


In Flesh and Bone

by unheroics



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Body Horror, Coming of Age, Injury, M/M, sergei polunin was not harmed in the making of this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-03-02
Packaged: 2018-09-22 05:40:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9585827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unheroics/pseuds/unheroics
Summary: After recovering from an injury that cut his previous season short, Yuri makes a comeback with a new coach, a new country of residence, and a relationship upgrade. Still: perfection takes effort.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to everyone who provided help and/or encouragement, particularly Nat and Raimi, plus the Twitter hivemind in general. This is going to get rather long with five parts of similar length, so strap in, mind the caveats below, and allow for some suspension of disbelief. More notes to come at the end.
> 
> All-purpose warning for body horror, descriptions of injuries (some self-inflicted), body image issues, and disordered eating. Mind the rating, too.

He lives by routines, with clockwork precision.

At four forty-five in the morning Yuri drags himself out of bed and into the shower down the hall. He stubs a toe against the sharp corner of a suitcase overflowing with hoodies and t-shirts, and curses under his breath. The suitcase is his whole life, compressed into travel size; tiny bottles of shampoo and shower gel still strewn somewhere along the bottom, for next time, and the one after that.

Hot water is almost too much, but it is always almost too much, and he shudders half from the shock of temperature change, half from the soreness in every major muscle group. Here’s the trick: you’ve got to start stretching right then, when it hurts the most and the water is scalding, so everything that comes later is easier in comparison. Heat masks the agony of joints bending in directions and at angles that human bodies aren’t supposed to bend.

Yuri pulls his right leg up into a split, putting the effort into his thighs and his hands, and if he curses, breathless, through clenched teeth — well, the hiss of spray drowns out any noises he might make. He braces himself, rests his heel on the shower wall, rests his forehead on his shin, and for a luxurious half a minute allows himself to just breathe.

That’s what he does. He braces himself, he hurts himself; he breathes. And again. All over again.

The rink will open in three hours, the studio in two, which leaves him plenty of time to practise at the barre. But, of course, the onsen doesn’t have a barre, and he has to make do with a DIY facsimile: a pair of skis tied together and fastened to the banister upstairs. Where he won’t disturb the other guests. Which he’s not, really; a guest, that is. More of a fixture by now, for as long as it takes.

Mrs Katsudon has long stopped shrieking at the unexpected sight of him in the early morning hours.

Mrs Katsuki. Grow up, Yurochka.

He stretches at the barre for an hour, keeping himself contained. No jumps, no stomping over hardwood that, despite the frigid air, isn’t as cold against his bare feet as he always expects it to be. His leggings are worn but warm, and soon enough the exertion is enough to compensate for the chill snaking up and down his arms and collar bones, where they’re bared by the sleeves of a t-shirt that is a size too big.

He’s halfway into the mindless trance of repetition when his foot catches on the seam between floorboards, tearing open a blister on his sole. But there’s no blood, just shredded skin and slight discomfort, and he ignores it.

A faint noise breaks his concentration, a little shrill, but muted, coming from across the wall. The alarm. It must be five-thirty in the morning now. Eleven-thirty in St Petersburg. Yuri can feel sweat beginning to break over his skin. He’s warmed up. He pads back to his room, flexing his arms over his head. The back of his t-shirt is a little damp at the nape.

It takes a moment before he finds his tablet, burrowed as it is in bedcovers, and then the room is basked in a small, cold glow. Another moment for the wifi to connect. Another for Facetime to sputter its way into a connection across the continent.

That’s why he stretches before calling. Otherwise he will shiver out of his skin, anticipation a live wire spitting electricity with no outlet.

He sits bent over the tablet, cross-legged on the bed, hair spilling down his face.

“—ove, come on.” That’s the first thing he hears, in Russian, and therefore already for his benefit. There’s the shuffle of a fluffy feline body over the laptop speakers, which sounds like rustling paper right beside his ear, and he has to school his expression into blank hostility before the video clicks on.

“Morning,” says Otabek. He looks tired, colour bleached from his face by artificial light. Where he should be all sharp jawline, now there are only flat pixels and a half-second lag. Not unlike the skis, in place of a barre. A facsimile of the real thing.

It’s still Wednesday for him. Strength training and plyometrics: the heaviest day of the week, at this time of the season. It shows in the way that Otabek holds himself, very carefully still, allowing overtrained muscles some reprieve. His t-shirt is a little frayed at the collar, and it slips, revealing a strip of skin, thin and vulnerable.

“You look terrible,” Yuri announces with a vicious smirk. “Yakov finally stopped going easy on you?”

“I’ve been here long enough.” Three months, precisely. In another nine, after the end of the season, his training exchange with Yakov will be finished. They talk about nothing while Yuri tries not to look too obviously at the time, counting down minutes, until Otabek says: “Oh, and Mila told me Jean-Jacques is doing the ESPN Body Issue. Did you know?”

“No,” says Yuri, feeling irritation crackle and spark. As if he needs any reminders that Otabek and JJ are friends, or friendly, or not actively murderous toward each other. As far as Yuri is concerned, everyone should feel at least a little homicidal rage toward JJ Leroy. “And I didn’t want to know, that’s the worst thing I’ve heard all day.”

“You’ve been awake for an hour, give it time.”

“I have to go. Practice went okay?”

Otabek smiles, which is always strange and slightly incongruous. It softens the harsh set of his mouth. He says, “It went okay. Don’t break your legs today,” which is something he always says, and once the connection dies and Yuri locks his tablet and his room plunges back into featureless grey of dawn, there is a lightness to the set of his shoulders that he knows will pull him through the training regimen.

He has a protein bar for breakfast, and a sugar-free energy drink. Mrs Katsuki is the only other person awake at this hour; even Makkachin is asleep, unmoved by Yuri stomping around. Yuri says hello to Mrs Katsuki in awful, halting Japanese that makes her laugh and toss him a sweet bun filled with sweeter jam. Almost motherly, or what is probably motherly to people who care about such things.

She always tosses him extra food. She must know, and never seems to mind, that Yuri will only feed the bun to stray cats to keep them still long enough to snap a photo to put online or send to Otabek. He christens Yuri’s strays with ridiculous names; it tends to be the highlight of Yuri’s days.

He makes it to the studio ten minutes after it opens.

…

That’s how Viktor finds him, half past seven in the morning: sweaty and irritated and trying to work more at the barre despite the inconsequential but increasingly insistent protests of his body.

He feels the shift in the air, even though Rachmaninov doesn’t; the music continues unabated. Yuri has one ankle pulled up, one hand keeping a light grip on it, hamstrings not as loose as he needs them to be. And then footsteps that he feels more as a peristaltic vibration against the floor, closer, and fingers folding over his where they are wrapped around the ankle.

“Now, look. You’re rushing it,” says Viktor, and pushes until Yuri’s heel folds over his ass. His other hand steadies Yuri at the hip, touch precise and almost clinical, palm moulded into the shape of bone.

“If you hurry through the routine you’ll pull something.” Viktor’s voice is the picture of pleased serenity. He steps away, until Yuri can see him in his field of vision at the far end of the room, settling down comfortably with his legs crossed. “Show me your grand allegro.”

It’s Thursday, and so it’s a lighter training day, but Yuri does a full turn at the barre every day.

“You’re not the boss of me,” he grumbles, a blatant untruth. He pulls out of the stretch and settles into the fifth position, en avant, and begins.

He doesn’t have to think about the routine, or the precise rhythm at which his iPod is spitting out music. Prokofiev’s _Romeo and Juliet_ , now. All that Yuri could hear of it has faded into the stomp and drum of his feet on the floor, the slide of flat shoes on polished wood. How Viktor is watching him, almost as noisy.

There’s still a shred of open admiration there, unashamed and so the worst kind, that makes Yuri want to never see himself in a mirror again. Mostly, though, there is a cool, analytical detachment as Viktor dissects every minute shift of momentum that Yuri carries into completion or lets peter out and build into something larger instead. It’s as if a tally takes shape behind Viktors eyes: this is where you’re okay. This is where you’re lacking. The odds are always skewed against Yuri.

But for a moment, for an imperfect two and a half minutes, he exists only in the mirror image of himself and in the performance, and in the lie of it. His body not his own.

He finishes arched forward, so that his hair will fall over his face and hide it from sight; so that Viktor won’t see the sweat rolling down the tip of his nose.

It’s been a long time, but he still expects Yakov’s voice and an annotated list of the many ways in which he ruined a perfectly good training routine. But Yakov is training Otabek, now, however briefly, and Yuri has — this.

“Cool down, and then we’ll go to the rink.” Viktor smiles a guileless smile that hides the cast iron edges of his will.

It’s another part of the routine, when they walk from the studio to the rink, and Viktor says hello to some of the people they pass on their way, all that cheerful politeness undeterred by his inability to string two words in Japanese together. It makes Yuri want to put his thumbs through his eye sockets. How long has he been at Hasetsu? Four or five months by now, probably. Anyone else would be making friends with the locals, as Viktor has.

Yuri just wants to go home. He takes pictures of the town and the changing seasons, puts them online or texts them to Otabek, or to Mila.

There is something cursed and humiliating about existing in liminal spaces. Suitcase always almost ready to go. Catching wifi wherever. Yuri had a laptop, but sold it; too clunky.

He wants to go home, but where is that? All he knows is that Hasetsu is not it.

…

Around the onset of 2018, in the space of time between the Grand Prix Final and Pyeongchang, three things happen in such a rapid succession that they all bleed together, into one tectonic upheaval of a life that’s already hectic, and later Yuri finds himself incapable of pulling them apart into separate events.

First: after the GPF, he ditches the nagging duumvirate of Yakov and Lilia and stays with his grandfather for two weeks. It isn’t as though he misses practice, even if all he can do after the spectacular failure of his second Grand Prix Final is upper-body strength training. It still leaves him as sore as he would have been in St Petersburg, or perhaps more, since he has no supervision. But he gets to sleep in the guest room of his grandfather’s apartment in Biryulyovo, cramped like a wax cell in the honeycomb of old, half-derelict tenements. His suitcase stays unpacked beside the fold-out sofa bed. Its liminality undiminished even here.

“Are you going to see her?” asks his grandfather, sleeves rolled up, as he chops onions that will go with the filling for varenyky. That’s how all of the conversations that matter happen between them, Yuri thinks: over food. Food that, most of the time, he eats only to skip the next meal while his grandfather isn’t looking.

He shrugs. The gesture goes unnoticed, with Yuri straddling a chair and facing his grandfather’s back, one leg stretched out before him to accommodate the brace that’s keeping his knee immobile.

His grandfather says, “She called last week. You could go up to Yekaterinburg for a day or two. I’m sure she would find time.”

“No, she wouldn’t.” Yuri almost laughs. He would, if he didn’t know how deeply it would cut. If there is one thing that Svetlana Nikolaevna Plisetskaya could never find for him, it was time. Not when she spent her life after retirement trying to build herself back up so as not to depend on her son to support her.

If she could find time for him, she would have taken him with her to Yekaterinburg all those years ago, and perhaps under her tutelage Yuri would be a pairs skater, continuing her tradition in deed instead of only in faith. But she never could. She never did. Yuri can’t blame her. She probably would have made a worse mother if she’d tried to be one. As it is, he knows that she watches most of his competitions. It’s just that it’s difficult to travel on crutches.

His grandfather says nothing. Nothing of substance. He tells Yuri to start frying the onions, moves around the kitchen with singleminded purpose: gets the dough from the fridge, rolls it flat over the tabletop, starts cutting it with the blunt rim of a glass.

“I should — I need to tell you something.” Yuri isn’t certain where the words come from, or the impulse. Once he says them he wishes he could swallow them back, and he watches his grandfather’s back tense. As if he’d known. “There’s, uh. There’s someone I like.”

“Yura. Turn the gas down.”

Yuri turns the gas down, and scrunches up his nose at the smell of burning oil. “I wanted to tell you. He’s —”

There’s a snap, sudden and sharp, as his grandfather shakes out a dish towel. It doesn’t echo, but the air shivers in the disturbance, flecks of flour spreading across the room in a cloud of painted dust.

“You’re young. Very young. Don’t tell me what I don’t need to know.” His grandfather says it very gently, and Yuri can pinpoint the precise moment in which the knot in his throat renders him incapable of speech. “What no one needs to know. Set the water to boil, this is done. I’ll get the filling ready.”

It’s as if a truth cannot exist until Yuri gives it voice. He knows about the times his grandfather has lived through, the history. The power of privacy and the power of information. As if there’s anyone these days who would want to use that information against either of them. _There’s someone. You’re young; don’t tell me._

Yuri has skated despite fractures, so what’s another? This one, this feeling of a bone cracked and raw before it accrues scarring: it won’t even show on an x-ray. New and incautious, and it could hurt him if he let it. So he doesn’t let it.

He nods, twice. To his grandfather in assent, and a second time, to clear his head of emotion he has no need for.

He sets the water to boil.

That’s one.

Two: after the surgery, he gets an offer. It’s a plain, undramatic email that Yuri desperately wants to find fault in and therefore allow himself not to respond. Suspicion makes a festering well of jealousy open inside him. The email is from Viktor, with none of his usual flair. They haven’t kept in touch after Viktor had retired a second and final time. He’s been known to show up on occasion in Yuri’s Instagram comment fields. A few texts, here and there.

The email reads, in Russian: _I hope by now you can read this, and that Yakov isn’t hovering too much — we both know how he is, worse than a grandmother. Yuuri and I saw your SP last week. Outstanding work, as always. If you’d managed to land those quads more gracefully, it would have been grounds for a gold medal performance. But the choreography was a little too flimsy for you, you’ve outgrown this style._

_Which brings me to my point. After discussing it with Yakov, I’d like for us to talk about your plans leading up to 2022. I have a few ideas, and you still have potential to break records. It would be a shame to waste it._

_Let me know when you have time for a video chat! )_

Despite misgivings, and a knee-jerk, automatic fury at being discussed without being present, at decisions made above his head, Yuri replies. He agrees to a Facetime call and remains civil throughout. It must be a sign of personal growth, when everything in him is threatening to spill out in an ugly, ugly torrent of emotion.

A month later he’s on a plane to Japan, seconded to the training and care of Viktor Nikiforov. He imagines that the hyperfocus that lasts for the duration of the flight is that of a soldier going to war. But he’s been at war from the moment he had first set foot in a rink, and his mother deemed him appropriately small and flexible — malleable — to shape into something worthwhile. Something usable. An instrument.

And on the flight to Fukuoka, he thinks the same thing he’d thought then, as a child, and so many times since: if he is to be a tool, he might as well excel at it.

That’s two.

Three: after Pyeongchang, which he watches on a live stream, there is a text, and all that unspools from it in threads of consequence.

> **otabek-altin** yakov is going to be training me for a year. he said you’re not in petersburg?

Yuri doesn’t respond for two days, unsure of how to do it. The uncertainty sits over his tongue, stapled to it like a fish hook no matter how much he tries to dislodge it, and he wonders briefly if he’s supposed to apologise. He’s never been considerate, and it is a wholly new experience to wonder whether he should be. Whether he should try. In the end, he doesn’t.

If Otabek wanted generosity of heart and kindness of spirit, he would have looked elsewhere. It isn’t them to apologise. It isn’t Yuri.

So in the end, he writes back: _utc 9, i’m training with viktor in japan. you can come visit his boyfriend’s dumb ass hot springs. or i’ll see you when i kick your ass next season._

That’s three.

He will always remember the smell of recycled cabin air on the flight to Fukuoka, reminiscent of his grandfather’s kitchen, dry and stuffy before steam had filled it. His time training in Japan with Viktor will always carry an aftertaste of a freshly broken bone, unscarred yet and therefore capable of hurting him. If he lets it.

And thinking of his grandfather will now always make him think of someone else, and of flying to Japan wound tight with a curious uncertainty. Forgetting to say goodbye.

…

He’s running late. He’s hungry, and sore, and he should have taken the bike despite the sweltering humidity and the threat of storm clouds hovering over the sky. When he’s late, Viktor always makes him do an additional half-hour at the gym, at weights. Yuri’s protests — the last thing he needs is more strength training when he’s already doing all he can to limit the increase of muscle mass, and weights won’t help him land a quad Axel, that unattainable Holy Grail — tend to fall on deaf ears.

In five minutes, he’s going to be late.

There is a large tabby cat sitting in the middle of the road, its head tilted to one side. No cars coming or going, not where Yuri can see. Orange and white, the cat looks as though it’s taken a nap in a puddle of spilled flour and it still clings to its belly. It watches Yuri. Yuri stops walking.

He looks to both sides, but still no cars come. Then he drops into a squat. Roots in his backpack for the little zip-locked bag of treats he carries besides his skates and tablet and training schedule notebook. The last is mirrored in his phone calendar, synced with Viktor’s, but Yuri likes to have backup. In case Viktor nukes the calendar by being technologically illiterate, or something.

He waves the treat, a little, until the cat decides to give in to temptation. Its tiny pink nose twitches, and then it crosses the street, and starts to nibble delicately but ruthlessly at Yuri’s fingers.

Yuri takes out his phone, waits only for the autofocus to zoom in on the cat’s quivering whiskers, snaps a picture.

> **yuri-plisetsky** this one  
>  image sent ✓  
>  **otabek-altin** tsaritsa margarita andreevna rumpelstiltskina  
>  **yuri-plisetsky** what, that’s it?  
>  **otabek-altin** the third.

Yuri nods, satisfied. The cat peers at him with cautious tolerance, but if he were to try to touch it, it would either dash away or bloody his hands. It’s still tempting to reach out and touch something that doesn’t want anything from him, that doesn’t want or need him at all. Small and so infinitely breakable, all those fragile bones.

The cat blinks, very slowly.

“You can go now, Your Majesty.” He waves one hand in a half-baptismal gesture, and the cat starts into movement as if electrocuted. It dives under a hedge that’s vibrantly green this close to the rainy season, and all that’s left in its wake is a rustle of branches.

And Yuri is off again. Late. He doesn’t care. There’s a weightlessness that comes from comfort, even a flash of it, not unlike the moment you kick off into the air and, right up until you hit the ground again, there’s nothing. Nothing else. You’re weightless. There isn’t even a little pain.

Then it all comes back. Blades hitting the ice, and every square centimetre of joint and muscle that worked for the jump now screams.

Both Viktor and Yuuri are at the rink, waiting for him, and that’s what it’s like. Like hitting the ice after a jump. Yuri grits his teeth and doesn’t let it rattle him, just tosses his backpack into a corner near the boards and kneels to start digging in it for his skates. Yanks them on, more forcefully perhaps than is needed. He feels that one irritating blister on his sole tearing, but it’s too late. If there is blood, when it dries it will at least keep his socks from slipping.

He’s not going to show weakness in front of Yuuri. Viktor might have already seen him at a few low points — inevitable, given their positions — but Yuri would rather eat a fistful of nails and chalk than have Yuuri witness it.

“Who the hell asked him here?” he asks, in Russian, so that he won’t have to look at Viktor to address him.

“I invited him.” English. Asshole.

“Great. That’s great.” Yuri ties the laces with such force that they dig into the flesh of his palms, leaving thin welts. He pulls out a scarf to tie around his neck, and gloves. He marches himself onto the ice. “Well? Do you want to get started, or do we need some sharing and caring? Kumbaya and everything?”

“Ah. Yuri, mind your manners.” This with a hint of vicious glee, as though it pleases Viktor to place himself in the role of a reprimanding teacher. He has always loved theatrics. But it’s children who get reprimanded, and Yuri skates toward him with murder in his eyes that he doesn’t bother to hide.

“Here’s manners: it’s detrimental to have him here at this stage of training.” He jerks his chin at Yuuri, who smiles with his particular kind of awkward, guileless serenity. But then why would he come, if he really hated this kind of social awkwardness? He’s as much of a theatrical vulture as Viktor. “I don’t have the routine down yet. He’s going to distract me, and I don’t need distractions. You don’t need distractions, either,” he adds, the lowest blow he can afford. “I want my coach in top form, not swooning like a lovesick spaniel over his codependent has-been boyfriend.”

“Codependent has-been partner,” Yuuri corrects, despite the colour rising in his cheeks as he does so.

“Yeah, right, in your dreams.”

Viktor ignores their exchange. He shrugs, without a shred of remorse. “I think if you can master the routine with Yuuri here, distracting you, it will be overall beneficial to how you skate it under pressure.”

There is no arguing. There is never any argument with Viktor, who can laugh and perform and steamroll a person into obedience, the world’s most enticing tyrant. Yuri wants to strangle him, then Yuuri. It helps to remember Barcelona; and to remember both Viktor’s brief return to skating, after. There is a depth to his teaching method, brutal and armed with concealed knives though it is, that Yuri has never seen before with other coaches.

Maybe that’s what makes him angriest. That he’s getting better. That he can feel himself getting better.

“Or we can do plyometrics today,” says Viktor. He shifts, so that his hair falls over his eyes and Yuri can’t read his expression at all. But he never really can. He fights the absurd impulse to sweep Viktor’s hair aside, force him to at least pretend to be human.

He looks at Yuuri. Notices, belatedly, that Viktor stands close enough to him to keep one hand resting comfortably over the dip in Yuuri’s spine. Very casual. As if Yuri needs a reminder of who, precisely, is the third wheel in this arrangement. Who always has been a background extra, thrown in to add colour to the poetic ruin of Viktor Nikiforov’s ebb into retirement. He fell and rose and fell again, but he was always going to come back to Hasetsu.

Yuri starts skating away, hot all over under his shirt and scarf. “Don’t get in my way. Ponimaesh?”

Yuuri sighs. “Da, da, ponimayu.” His Russian is atrocious, but Yuri swallows a mocking retort. It burns his tongue.

And Yuuri does understand. He keeps to the side, and lets Yuri focus on nothing but the routine. At this stage it is the bare bones, a set of figures without much of a choreography staggering it into a whole performance. Viktor is keeping the music he’d chosen for it secret; he wants Yuri to master the groundwork first. He’s never been kept in the dark for so long. Usually, by this time, he’d have had the music.

All Yuri knows is that the theme of his set for next season is going to be sacrifice.

He projects as much of it as his body can contain: tapers off the edges of arrogance and will, and allows himself to wade ankle-deep into the uncharted waters of helpless subservience. Slave to perfection, like Viktor had described it. Betrothed to an idea that won’t ever let him make it out alive.

…

Cooling down, not only after a training session but after a day, is agony. But it’s always agony. Yuri can feel every part of his body that never wanted to be used for this. The barely-there shiver in his muscles that makes him drop things, miss steps on stairs, his limbs’ one last bid for futile self-preservation when Yuri has no strength left to bully himself into submission.

If perfection takes effort, then this is it. His body is not his own.

It’s only nine, but he’s had dinner, and at this stage of the training cycle his day ends at eight, after Viktor has pinned tomorrow’s calorie schedule onto a corkboard in the kitchen once Yuuri had translated it into Japanese, and added Yuri’s name on it next to a drawing of a hissing cat. It’s there mostly for Mrs Katsuki’s benefit, since Yuri knows his diet by heart; but she prepares his meals.

One day he will tell her not to bother erring on the too generous side of small portions. Sometimes, when Yuri is too weak and his discipline slips, he actually eats all of what she gives him, and has to hide in the bathroom for a while. It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s worth it, to have one more layer of control nailed into place. And the discomfort, his palate scraped raw from vomiting, seems appropriate punishment for weakness.

After he slides the screen door of his room shut, he can breathe. Without bracing. Just breathe, alone in his own company, in a pocket of silence among the onsen’s regular noise. There are a few other guests, but the sounds of life outside are muted.

Yuri turns on the desk lamp and drops onto the bed, sprawling upside down. Feet on the window sill, head down so his hair almost spills to the floor.

He scrolls through the notifications on his phone, until he finds a message he actually feels like opening.

> **mila-babicheva** i almost want to try some lifts with him………  
>  **mila-babicheva** but we’d probably die  
>  **yuri-plisetsky** ??????????  
>  **mila-babicheva** is sending a file…

It’s a video. Yuri thumbs it open. Shaky, with medium orange light of the rink translating into a film of grain and noise. And the music is terrible, tinny and full of static, like a corrupted file trying to force itself into coherence. It doesn’t matter. Yuri feels breath die in his lungs.

Otabek skates as if it’s a competition, not training, gunning for gold over the dying protests of a body cowed into bankruptcy. He must be exhausted, it shows in the stiff set of his shoulders, hidden only by the plain black of his training uniform. But he has momentum, and it pulls him through. When he passes the camera, Yuri hears the screech and grind of ice beneath the blades of his skates. Then it’s gone. Then he turns, a good running start, and if the first sight of him made Yuri stop breathing, the quadruple Salchow that Otabek lands with barely a stumble makes him suck in air. Like someone drowning.

The jump was so high. And he only keeps going, ignores Mila’s excited whoop as she cheers him on, voice mangled by her phone’s speakers; he gives himself space to gain back breath and speed and jumps, again, triple Lutz and triple toe combination. Watching Otabek is like watching a predator, every line of his body polished and poised, in a natural habitat instead of just a cage.

In the privacy of his own mind Yuri can admit that it’s beautiful. How he compensates for inflexibility, for the closed set of his hips. Yuri wants to take a scalpel to his will and determination and see where the seams will be loose. See where he could cut a grove deep enough to push his fingers inside. Feel what’s in there.

He knows what he looks like when he’s skating: dead behind the eyes. He wants to know where Otabek finds the lie of emotion, because he has it, it’s in him, but the pretence doesn’t pollute him like it does Viktor.

He rewinds the video. And again. His hand lies flat on his stomach, and he shifts on the bed until his knees are open, ignoring the discomfort. Rewinds the video again and doesn’t move his hand. The walls here are so thin.

He doesn’t know how many times he watches the training routine. How many is too many? His breath comes fast and shallow, and he has every point and angle memorised. He opens the messaging app again.

> **yuri-plisetsky** tell him to watch the landing. that was disgraceful

It takes fifteen minutes for Mila to reply, _tell him yourself_. Yuri throws the phone away from himself like something poisonous.

Later, he sits in bed with the lights off, and plans his stretches for tomorrow. His routine for the barre. Something to ameliorate the pain in his foot from blisters torn open thrice over. His sock had come off stiff with blood, and he had to soak it in cold water before tossing it into the basket with the rest of his laundry.

He bends his toes inward, as far as they’ll go; then he pushes them further with his palm, and rotates his foot without needing to see the shift of bone and ligament beneath the skin. His fingers catch on the rough fabric of tape. First one foot, then the other. It barely even hurts.

Footsteps, then quiet conversation.

Sometimes it’s strange to think that Viktor and Yuuri are at the onsen as well, stuck in the same liminal space despite being firmly grounded in concrete, undeniable reality. Yuri stops breathing, trying to make out individual words as Viktor and Yuuri pass right next to his room. The screen doors give a barest modicum of privacy, but he can only hear murmurs. Easy and comfortable. The way people talk to each other when they’re close, when their nearness is not a threat.

And then it gets quiet again, and Yuri is left wondering. Does he try to imagine? Of course. Not that he’d admit it under torture and pain of death. What must it be like, to hold someone falling asleep? Probably uncomfortable. All those limbs to coordinate, and bones in the way. Angles. Yuuri didn’t drop his fighting weight, and Viktor has always been all lean muscle, and Yuri can’t make his mind skitter away fast enough to avoid thinking of what they’re like together.

If it’s easy between them. All that emotion boiling over, cresting in simple animal need. If Viktor stays in charge. He probably doesn’t, not when Yuuri lets go. When push comes to shove, and Yuri has pushed things many times to the point of just that, he knows that Yuuri’s higher impulses take a back seat. What comes out is always hungry and sharp-teethed. Maybe, for Viktor, that’s the appeal.

Yuri hears a thump, very faint, from down the hall. And again. Other noises that he doesn’t want to hear. When he holds his breath, he can almost make out the shape of a sigh, or perhaps a moan.

He has to wonder. He can’t not. What would it be like to touch someone whenever and however he wanted, to have that freedom of proximity. If it would be easy without the breadth of a continent between him and who he wants.

But down the hall Viktor and Yuuri belong to themselves, and Yuri’s body is not his own.

All he can do is cover his mouth with one hand and use the other on himself, with his back to the wall, swallowing every noise, unsure of where to hang his imagination: Otabek taking to the air with the grace of a panther, or what’s right here, down the hall, bodies in motion. And later, when he’s wiping his fingers in a tissue and willing his heart to slow, maybe he feels a little empty, maybe that’s how it’s supposed to feel.

It helps him fall asleep, though. He’ll deal with muscle cramps in the morning. He’ll call Otabek in the morning, too, after stretching, after he’s banked this useless need.

…

Yuri had skated in the 2017 Grand Prix Final, or rather, he’d skated his short program, and left an acceptable eight-point gap between himself and Nekola in second place.

During morning practice before the men’s free skate, Yuri had never seen Lee Seung-Gil coming at him, and Lee hadn’t seen him. Only Lee had been lucky enough to get away with a concussion and a nosebleed, dramatic at first glance but ultimately harmless. Yuri would have gladly skated through a concussion. He had, on a different occasion.

Instead the blade of Lee’s skate had nearly sawed through the back of Yuri’s knee, shredding the collateral ligament.

Yuri had watched the men’s free skate and medal ceremony from a hospital wheelchair, so angry he’d thought it would leave him blind. He’d been on crutches by New Year, his participation in every event of that season long withdrawn, wondering if that’s what his mother felt after her own career-ending injury, before she’d known it would actually end her career.

Perhaps this is what made him agree to Viktor’s offer of coaching. Because Viktor had said, during their Facetime call, with all apparent sincerity, “If you train under me, I promise you won’t finish another competition off the podium.”

It is never painless, and sometimes there is blood, and maybe he will rend himself in the process, but what’s a little pain? Perfection takes effort.


	2. Chapter 2

In 2017, after his short program in the Grand Prix Final, Yuri spends the whole day holed up in his hotel room, refusing to pick up the phone that’s periodically throwing fits, vibrating across the bedside table, threatening to fall. Let it.

Yuri had had a run-in with JJ, and there might have been a rather one-sided and largely ineffectual fistfight, and Yakov screamed about unsportsmanlike behaviour and Yuri bringing untold shame to the FFKK by brawling like a drunk. Then, someone tweeted the whole thing with complementary video material. It’d been worth it to wipe the smug grin off JJ’s face, after his short program had put him half a point ahead of Yuri.

Yuri is not here to make friends. He is not here to foster good relations through sport, and pat his co-competitors on the backs for coming second as they swallow their pride. He’s only here to win.

He’s watching his free skate from the previous events on his tablet, the indisputable triumph from the Rostelecom Cup where he’d placed first, and the Trophée de France, where he came in third. He looks for deficiencies, for mistakes he can still fix — or at least compensate for — before the free skate the day after tomorrow. In Bordeaux, he’d foregone one of the quads, and the sudden change threw him off balance enough that his GOE suffered as well.

There is a knock on the door. It isn’t followed by screaming, but just in case, Yuri shouts, “Leave me the hell alone, Yakov! I’m not apologising.”

Nothing. Then: “Yura, it’s me.”

Yuri’s hands clench over the tablet, indenting the screen. He puts the tablet down before he can break it.

When he throws the door open, it’s to see Otabek still in his practice gear. He must have come straight from the rink. Yesterday, there had only been time for rushed, quick encouragements before their short programs. They have spent the whole season missing each other by bare inches, and Yuri doesn’t mind just texting, but faced with Otabek physically here there is nothing Yuri can do but let him in.

“If you’re here to get all sanctimonious about sportsmanship and how I shouldn’t have broken his nose, spare me.”

“You didn’t break his nose,” says Otabek, looking around Yuri’s hotel room with open curiosity. There isn’t much to it, a room like a thousand others, but he seems perfectly content to take in the sights. “I don’t think you’re strong enough to break anyone’s nose, really.”

“Don’t make me prove you wrong.”

Yuri isn’t sure how it happens, exactly. Perhaps they have a routine of their very own. He mocks Otabek for his odd friendship with JJ, Otabek tells him a little about training together in Canada, and that Yuri is too quick to judge people; Yuri informs him that he judges people after a perfectly reasonable amount of time.

They end up on Yuri’s bed, watching Yuri’s free skate from Bordeaux. The tablet is propped up on Otabek’s thighs in a way that means Yuri needs to sit poised at an angle to have a clear view, not draped across Otabek but close to it. He doesn’t. Want a clear view, that is. His own deficiencies stand out all the more starkly when seen by an outside observer, and by Otabek specifically, someone who Yuri maybe likes, or admires, or any of those other feelings he doesn’t care to think about.

He sits cross-legged a careful distance from Otabek, as far as the bed’s width will allow, and watches himself skate on the small screen from the corner of his eye. Light flattens out the LED display, and the colours are all off.

Yuri worries at a hangnail on his toe, keeps pulling and tugging at the ragged bit of skin, morbidly compulsive. He can barely feel it, save that he can: sharp little pinpricks of pain that keep him present, fully aware. His instep is covered with tape, and there is a spare support bandage in the bedside drawer. As if all that could help the bruised and blistered ruin of his feet.

When it hurts, it’s easier to look at the tablet. When he’s looking at the tablet, he doesn’t have to look at Otabek.

In the video, he executes an Ina Bauer that is formally correct. But it’s ugly, somehow. Free of personality. Intolerable. It didn’t feel wrong at the time.

Otabek makes a noise of such incomprehensible subtlety that it lands like a precision strike over Yuri’s solar plexus, penetrating within. Unthinking, he digs his nails into the callused skin on the side of his toe, yanks at the hangnail sharply, and feels blood trickle down into the webbing between first and second toe.

“Yuri.” Soft and a little perplexed.

“Shut up.”

Otabek pauses the video, locks the tablet and tosses it to the bed. “Wait here. Don’t move.”

He gets up and heads to the ensuite, leaving Yuri with his toe a bloody mess dripping on the bedcovers, grinding his teeth in useless frustration. Maybe that’s what he should do before every final: watch his own failures, conveniently arranged into a single video. He wonders if Otabek would have pushed him off the podium entirely, if he’d skated in the Trophée de France.

Otabek returns with a bottle of diluted hydrogen peroxide and two rolls of bandage, the old inflexible kind that can be tossed into the wash and used over and over. Yuri always stashes a few into his first aid kits, just in case. Otabek sits on his heels in front of the bed, grabs Yuri’s ankles, and pulls his legs over the edge so that one foot dangles off to the side and the other lands in his lap, unmindful of the blood staining his trousers.

The hydrogen peroxide burns when it hits the shredded skin over Yuri’s toe, and when the sizzling foam clears he can see that he ripped a half-inch hole down from toenail to knuckle. It’s vile to look at, the flesh already swollen into pulp, as if he’d taken a cheese grater to his foot, and Yuri can only hiss out his relief when the whole mess of it disappears under the bandage.

Otabek wraps his toe very tightly, but only his toe: four times, down to the sole for support, then back to the toe. He doesn’t cover Yuri’s other toes. Of course. It would limit Yuri’s range of movement.

“Don’t pick at it again,” says Otabek, tying a neat bow over the bridge of Yuri’s foot, “or it’ll swell so much you won’t fit into your skates. Don’t make it so easy for me to win tomorrow.”

“Whatever. Like I’m ever going to let you.”

Otabek slaps his shin, peering up at Yuri, inscrutable as always. He takes hold of Yuri’s leg, fingers sinking into the meat of Yuri’s shin slightly above the ankle, fitting into the groves of muscle and tendon.

“Don’t pick at your feet. All right?”

Yuri has to swallow before he can speak. “All right, all right. D’you take pointers from Yakov? You’re not my keeper.”

“No, I prefer less thankless tasks,” says Otabek, with a shade of a smile. His hand is still around Yuri’s shin, digging in but not yet a threat. Not quite yet. “Do you want to finish watching the video?”

It’s the last thing Yuri wants: to watch himself fail that Ina Bauer again and again in high definition on a ten-inch display. An idea comes to him unbidden, precipitated by their closeness and the echo of Otabek’s touch on his leg. Maybe it’s that brief flare of temper that Otabek let slip; the cracks in his mask always make Yuri want to peel it off entirely. Maybe he’s wanted it from the start. Wanted Otabek. Does it matter?

So, “No,” Yuri says, and jackknifes his legs, throwing them to the side so he has space to curl his hands in the collar of Otabek’s t-shirt. He pulls Otabek onto the bed and Otabek collapses half on top of him in a breathless sprawl, knees bracketing Yuri’s thighs. It isn’t comfortable, but they both know how to navigate exhaustion; now they only have to learn to navigate each other.

All the optimal angles of access and execution. Yuri flips them, a push here and a pull there, ungentle, until Otabek is sat with his back to the wall and the windowsill grinding into his spine. Thighs spread. He’s easy to distract.

Yuri won’t ever tell him it’s his first kiss, in a mid-range hotel in Lyon trying not to think about the exact number of points he will have to aim for to get the gold tomorrow, over Otabek, over everyone. It’s not a bad kiss, for a first. Yuri has no idea if he’s doing it right, but he can’t be failing too badly: one of Otabek’s hands finds its way into his hair, to keep him close.

They don’t talk about it. They can hash out the specifics later.

The following morning, Yuri collides with Lee Seung-Gil during practice. The blade of his skate nearly saws through the back of Yuri’s knee. It shreds the collateral ligament.

Yuri watches the men’s free skate from a hospital wheelchair. He’s out for the rest of the season.

…

In Hasetsu, Saturdays are easy. Viktor takes a step back from micromanaging the minutiae of Yuri’s life and turns his carnivorous attachment to Yuuri and their now-shared friends, to Yuuko Nishigori and her husband and their daughters. Yuuri’s family, too, but mostly Yuuri. They take Makkachin for long walks by the pier and Instagram photos of the sea.

Sometimes they go to the rink together, and skate pairs while no one is watching; Yuri had once followed them, out of morbid curiosity.

He doesn’t want to be there for it. Happy families and happy couples. Who needs that? It’s just one more wrench in discipline and control. But Viktor gave up skating, and now he isn’t the one who needs control and discipline. He isn’t the one breaking himself into bits, to then stitch them back together into as close to perfect as he can.

Yuri slips out of the onsen with lunch in his backpack, carefully self-curated, a bottle of Lipovitan, and his phone.

Saturdays in Hasetsu are easy because being at Minako’s studio is easy. They speak the same language: not English, but ballet, and for as long as he’s been coming around to train with her on Saturdays she’s been making disappointed noises. That he should never have picked skating. That he’d have a longer career in dancing, and more appreciation, and maybe it wouldn’t be easier on his body, but he wouldn’t be rushing toward retirement before the age of 25. And all Yuri wants to tell her is: look at you. Is that supposed to be the ideal? Settling down with a provincial small town ballet studio that makes all of its money catering to figure skaters, drinking to forget the good times that didn’t last.

That’s the language they share. Disquiet.

Despite it, Yuri wants to soak in her presence, take in all she can offer, watch her move and sew her grace and lightness of gesture into his own skin. Twenty years off the stage, and she never lost any of it; even drunk, she moves like a ballerina. Yuri turned seventeen in March, and soon time and biology will strip him of all that’s become the hallmark of his skating style, leaving mediocrity.

Minako doesn’t go easy on him, but she has no professional responsibility to really push him either, so the stretches at the barre and the dancing routines are never much of a challenge. She critiques his adagio, his petite allegro, his grand allegro, and then dares him to do it all again en pointe. As if that’s supposed to be daunting.

He pulls on the spare pointe shoes she selects for him. He gets lost in the routine, doesn’t even see her recording until the telltale flash of her floral phone case.

Yuri doesn’t let it distract him, this sudden invasion, and finishes the set as he had started: in easy, weightless écarté derrière. He holds his head high as he would for an audience. Tilted coyly to one side in scripted seduction. He feels the strain in his left foot in tendu, pain radiating from the bridge and threading into the instep, the deep-set ache in his injured knee, but he focusses instead on placing his left arm in high fifth. Hold it. Hold.

Minako claps, and he drops the position, grinning. Pushes his hair out of his face, suddenly awkward. Lets himself fall to the floor and aims a peace sign at the camera.

“I’m sending it to you. They will love it,” Minako says. She’s laughing.

Yuri shrugs. Across the room he can hear his phone vibrating where it is laid on the studio floor, as it receives the video. So he crosses over to upload the file to Instagram, without watching. He doesn’t want to watch it. There’s only really one person he hopes will see it.

> **yuri-plisetsky** ·  1m  
>  Pointe training with **@minako_okukawa** #hasetsu #japan

It’s nine in the morning in St Petersburg. No reason to think Otabek is checking his Instagram feed. Yuri rolls the strain out of the bridge of his foot, ignoring his knee. The muscle isn’t pulled, there is no visible damage; just the edge of tape peeling off abraded skin, and he rubs at the reddened spot until his fingers feel hot with it. He watches Minako go through her own routine for his benefit.

The comment notification he’s waiting for doesn’t come.

…

He isn’t expecting a call an hour to midnight; five in the afternoon is still training time in St Petersburg. Otabek should know better, and should know that Yuri would — will — give him so much undisguised shit for taking a break to socialise. He can’t text, of course. Yuri glares at the incoming call before he accepts with a vicious swipe of his thumb.

“You’re wasting time.”

He manages to get the words out before the video settles, and once it does, his irritation splinters into a thousand little biting pinpricks of heat. The first thing he can focus on is sweat that he immediately realises is not sweat; Otabek is fresh out of the shower, and hasn’t towelled off yet. His hair sticks up in every direction and over one eye, a tangled mess. Yuri wants to run his fingers through it, fix it, make it neater.

His wrist twinges in pain when he flexes it, but Otabek won’t see it. Yuri angles the tablet more comfortably where it rests propped up against his thighs, and wishes, suddenly, for headphones. For an illusion of privacy, with the walls here so thin.

“And you should be asleep.”

“If you want to order me around, I’m just going to hang up.” Asshole, Yuri adds, and doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say: I might let you order me around if you wanted. He won’t hand weakness over to the competition, not like this, on a silver platter. Even if ‘competition’ hasn’t been the first word he associates with Otabek for a long time now.

Otabek tilts his head sideways, maybe catching better light, maybe catching a better angle to see Yuri. Like always, he seems to take his time cataloguing every inch of skin and background, every microexpression. He doesn’t give anything back, only flat regard and the bastard child of a smile and a frown. Not quite committing to either.

“I saw that video of your ballet training,” he says, after he’s seen all there is to see. He doesn’t comment on the routine itself, and Yuri tells himself that he wasn’t waiting for it. Hoping. He wasn’t. “Are you sure you don’t want to change careers?”

“Minako says the same thing. That I’d get more traction out of dance.”

“Minako —”

Yuri nods. “Okukawa. She won the Benois de la Danse like a trillion years ago. She’d give Lilia a run for her money.”

“Like you’re giving me a run for mine?” Otabek’s voice is light and the frown-smile is sincere, but there is nothing but resignation — fond resignation — in his eyes. Yuri never thought competing could be like this, bleeding into his private life to hold it hostage. By now it’s really more of a question of whether he would want it any other way.

He stretches, and in the dark the sound of his joints popping echoes morbidly across the room. “Get better and you won’t have to worry about it.”

“I don’t worry.” Otabek drops his gaze somewhere below Yuri’s chin, but it isn’t demure. He blinks. “I still have a good few years to beat you in a fair fight.”

The reminder of both of their expiration dates doesn’t make Yuri flinch. “Which gold? Because I’m not giving them all up. Mila sent me a video of your short program a few days ago,” he adds. His knee starts to ache from the odd constriction of his position, so he stretches one leg, then the other; his feet slide over the sheets with a dull rustle. “Erlkönig? Really?”

“Lilia choreographed it. She thought it’s appropriate.” Otabek lifts his eyebrows. Yuri wants, more than anything, to brush away the hair that’s falling over his eye. It’s distracting. “What did you think?”

Yuri gives careful consideration to his answer, remembers the uncanny height of Otabek’s jumps, the ruthless precision of each flip. He says, “It’s violent. And dynamic, so it suits you, but you don’t look very scared or crazy. You might want to try looking crazier.”

“She wanted it to be more ambiguous. There’s no father, and maybe the boy doesn’t mind being kidnapped. He’s scared, but it’s too tempting.”

“He dies at the end, though.” It feels important to make sure Otabek knows this.

Otabek smiles another quarter of the way. “He does. And he still wants it. It wouldn’t be real catharsis otherwise.”

…

The next day on the pier he meets a cat that looks like Murka. Maybe a little less fluffy, and a lot less spoilt, and smaller. Otabek’s cat is uncannily overgrown, like some get after spaying. But this one has the same colouring, dark face and socks and tip of the tail that she flicks in Yuri’s direction. He tries to snap a picture, but it darts in and out of focus, unable to keep still and refusing to succumb to Yuri’s offered treats.

It’s still a few more hours of daylight, and the onsen should be teeming with people being kind and loving to one another.

Viktor finding Yuri at the pier is the first break in routine in days. His shadow falls over where Yuri sits, crouched on a bench a good distance from the breakwater. Tall and expansive like the rest of him. Hasetsu could never contain him, and it angers Yuri all over again, the knowledge that Viktor had to compress himself into something lesser to fit in. To belong.

He gets up, levels Viktor with a flat stare that he knows is all challenge, no give.

“I still don’t know how you can stand it here.” He sticks his hands deeper into the pockets of his runner jacket, stretching the fabric at the front. It’s so bright, the sun high above, light scattered over the water like spilled sequins. “When was your last time on ice, outside of training me?”

“Oh? Last Saturday.” Viktor smiles, in that particular way that makes Yuri want to scrape it off his face with sandpaper. All happy grin and crinkling eyes, so fake you could cut yourself on it. But it’s almost worth it to hear him speak Russian, and to be able to speak it in return. Otherwise Yuri is forced into English, to accommodate Yuuri. “With the triplets. They’re getting very good, you know; I think in a few years they might try out for juniors. That would be fitting. Start a local tradition.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Viktor’s smile fades, expression bleeding plastic artifice. “I know.”

“Is it worth it?” And then, the question poised to cut: “Is he that good? Because he doesn’t look it. Or did you feel threatened, so you backed out while you were still ahead?”

“This might just be the longest sentence you’ve ever spoken to me.”

“I’m going to push you into the fucking sea.”

Viktor laughs, sudden, almost startled into it; but, of course, nothing actually ever takes him by surprise. He stands, the wind whipping his coattails about his legs and pushing his hair into his eyes. He turns away from Yuri, toward the open water, his silhouette stark and defined against the blurry pastel background of the pier.

Out of the corner of his eye, Yuri sees the cat-that-is-not-Murka stroll lazily past them, back toward the town.

“They never tell you,” Viktor says, slowly, measuring the words against unseen scales, “that there’s a life after. So you grow up, and you think, I’m going to be the best, I will do this thing, and it will make me immortal. And it never does, does it? You’re eighteen, you’re twenty. You’re in your mid-twenties and you practically have one leg over the grave.”

“I know. But that’s the deal, it’s what happens.” Yuri feels a weight of disappointment that is almost physical, stuck in his throat. Why did he bother asking? Why bother. “So you got scared.”

“There isn’t a point where you can stop sacrificing. You pull yourself inside out, you break yourself over and over, and it’s never enough. Your best is never good enough. And what is it worth, anyway, the pride of strangers?”

“You’re completely incomprehensible.”

Viktor turns back to him. There is colour high in his cheeks from the wind, and his eyes are bright from the sun reflected across water. He says, “All you can do is find someone who will take your best and give you an after. If you can’t make that happen, you might as well put the other leg in the coffin.”

“Not everybody is crazy enough to waste their career like that.” But there’s no conviction in Yuri’s voice, and hearing his own vulnerability makes him a little sick.

Sicker to know that Viktor hears it, too.

“Skate Canada is only a few months away. Have you ever gone to a competition just to cheer someone on, not to compete? It’s a singular experience.”

…

Otabek’s short program is choreographed so that he dies at the end of it, killed by the incongruously gentle climax of the music. It makes for a terrific performance, and it will be made even more striking on ice, in costume, as he throws himself bodily toward the podium. It seems obvious that he will place in the top third. Yuri watches every snatched clip of video that Mila sends him, biting on a thumbnail until it bleeds.

Otabek dies in his short program, and Yuri dies in his free skate. It’s a different kind of death.

“It’s about giving all of yourself for something larger than life,” Viktor tells him, sketching the story with his hands, vague shapes done with slim wrists and long fingers. “The chosen one is hand-picked by fate to perform the sacrificial dance, while everyone else watches. On and off stage. Spring can only be ushered in if something dies for it.”

He’d played the music for Yuri earlier, watching Yuri’s reaction with undisguised fascination. Yuri tried to correlate each of the figures listed for the routine with a particular swell in the music here, a sudden drop there; one long spasmodic build into crescendo, and it’s fitting that it’s about dancing yourself to death, but it doesn’t fit anywhere else. A ballet that isn’t any kind of ballet he has been taught.

“You think I can do this?” Yuri asks, after bringing up a video of some experimental adaptation up on his phone. The prima is naked by the end and Yuri doesn’t know how to feel, so he defaults to feeling angry. This is what Viktor had meant by sacrifice. This is what he’d meant by desperation. Viktor wants to include a quad Axel in it if Yuri can land one without a harness by September, and it seems like insanity, it seems like sabotage.

Yuri doesn’t want to peel back any layers of hidden meaning behind the choice in music and theme, what Viktor might be trying to tell him in his own perplexing way.

“Do you think you can’t?” Viktor inclines his head, avian and curious.

“I can — technically, I can. Maybe not the Axel, but yeah, everything else.”

“Then what’s the issue?”

Yuri opens his mouth to speak, but no words want to take shape.

He shakes his head, and ties his skates, and the laces dig into the insides of his palms. It hurts, but he ignores it, that sick feeling of boots rubbing against skin that’s already raw, too-thin over his ankles where calluses don’t form. Use and misuse, but what’s a little pain? He staggers to the ice and Viktor takes it from there, directs Yuri through the set, the music tinny where it comes from the speakers in the corner of the rink.

Yuri is alive in the places where the ice touches him, alive in the echo of the music. Viktor wrenches it out of him by force, with a smile on his face and a grip on Yuri like a chokehold. Where there are only two options, and one of them is to be perfect; the other is unthinkable.

“Remember that the sacrifice is willing,” Viktor is saying to his back as he skates to the centre of the rink. “Up until a point, it’s willing, and then you have no choice.” Then compulsion takes over and Yuri’s body is pulled by unseen strings. When he spins in place, it’s to see Viktor talking without much of an expression, abstract and a little absent in the eyes, as though describing a maths equation: “You need to project the willingness, the choice in sacrifice, and then the loss of choice.”

So Yuri tries. What he’s lacking in emotion he tries to siphon from those remnants of old jealousy, set so deeply into his bones they might have replaced his marrow, and wonders if that’s the desperation Viktor is looking for. Close enough to fool Viktor, that’s all he needs. When he’s done, Viktor says, “No. Do it again. And do it better.”

Yuri does it again, and he does it better. He ignores the sweat that’s beginning to make his fleece chilly and damp despite how warm it is outside the rink, gets back into the centre of the ice now crisscrossed with skidmarks, and waits for Viktor to rewind the music back to the beginning.

The difficulty is not so much in the skill required, but more in the necessity of keeping the music a part of himself. To keep himself present, and not step out of his body to survey his work. It always happens almost against his will, this remoteness, when his skin becomes something alien and too small for him, and to stay inside it is to choke. From the outside he can pour all of his concentration into scoring the highest GOE possible, to make up for potential deficiencies.

In his head the free program is a diagram drawn around the figures, one bleeding into the next with tense, agonised precision. Every quad, the triple flip, triple Lutz, triple toe loop combination; the combination spin from which he needs to build momentum quickly enough for a quad Salchow. They all feel so easy on the tongue.

They leave his lungs burning when he finishes.

The camera flash is off, but he spots the phone in Viktor’s hand like a beacon anyway, documenting each move.

For the third go around Viktor leaves the phone propped up by the boards and skates beside Yuri, then behind him. He moves with Yuri without a shred of self-consciousness, liquid and languid, all easy twists despite the clunky practice skates.

He doesn’t touch Yuri, keeps his hands poised always an inch or two from physical contact. He corrects Yuri’s form without needing to yell across the rink, and it shouldn’t be possible to feel the heat of him over layers of clothes and fleece, but Yuri still does. The third pass doesn’t need music.

Instead it has this, drowned into a murmur over the grind of blades over ice: “Keep the attitude. Good, stay centred — push on the edges, Yuri, that’s full points —”

It’s a miracle that Yuri doesn’t poke out an eye with his elbow, or cut Viktor’s throat halfway through a spin, but Viktor always knows when to move back and away. The absence of him is more pronounced than his nearness, until distraction builds and Yuri begins to stumble, avoids a fall by the skin of his teeth.

Then it builds, and he’s uncomfortable and thrown off-balance. He’s too present in his skin and feeling every centimetre of it fit ill over someone else’s misaligned bones, with a pit of coals burning a hole through his abdomen. It’s the warmth that Viktor is radiating. There is too much of it, and Yuri isn’t used to that kind of thing. He doesn’t know what to do with it, and he can’t skate through it, and before he can take the last triple toe at a running start, he twists out of the range of Viktor’s grasp.

“What the hell is your problem?”

“I wasn’t aware I had one,” says Viktor. Yuri shoves him away, because it feels as though he won’t be able to get enough air in his lungs until there is at least half the rink’s width between them, and Viktor skates backward with weightless elegance. “Do you need a break?”

“Yeah. From you.” Yuri spits it out, informal second person that he’d barely ever noticed himself using before. It sounds unbecoming now, improper. “Keep your hands to yourself, understand?”

Viktor blinks. “I haven’t touched you.”

You didn’t have to, Yuri thinks in abject despair. Abject despair that shifts into abject fury when he takes in a breath, and realises that he’s hard, like a hormonal novice straining against the impulses of his body. Viktor hasn’t touched him. Yuri never wanted him to; doesn’t want it, now. The forced proximity makes it apparent that no one has actually touched Yuri in a longer time than he cares to think. And Viktor lives just down the hall, with Yuuri, with their ease and their nonchalant, offhand intimacy. Nausea lodges in Yuri’s throat.

“I’m taking five,” he says, in a disgusted half-growl.

The rink is empty save for them. Not even the Nishigori triplets lurk in the shadows, cataloguing Yuri’s training for their insane stalker portfolios. Yuri tugs his skates off and slinks down the badly lit corridors in just his socks, with Viktor’s gaze like a physical manifestation of guilt, until he can duck into the men’s room, past the vending machine and the line of urinals, into a locked stall. He’s fumbling to unlock his phone before the door has even swung shut.

The thought of a Facetime call makes him feel a little sick, but so do roaming charges, and in the end he thumbs open Whatsapp and calls Otabek, voice-only.

It’s half eight in St Petersburg. When Otabek picks up and says, “Hey,” he sounds winded, and there is a faint rushing noise that Yuri realises after a second is water. He lets an image take root in his mind, Otabek taking a run by the Griboyedov Canal, down the quay and across any of its bridges. St Petersburg in early summer is the most beautiful city he’s ever seen. “Did something happen?”

Because it’s half three in Hasetsu, and Yuri is in the middle of practice. He shakes his head, and leans back against the closed stall door. Slides down, slowly, until he can squat on the floor with one elbow over his knees and his head down. “No. Nothing happened.”

A beat, then: “Sorry, I don’t really have time.”

“Wait, just — what are you doing today?” Yuri asks it as if he doesn’t know, hasn’t memorised Otabek’s timetable out of necessity, to navigate divergent time zones. He drops his head lower, stretches one leg in front of him. The toilet here is Japanese style, low to the floor and hellishly strange to use, but it gives Yuri more space to make himself comfortable. He shifts until he’s sitting down, feet and knees spread wide.

“Strength training,” says Otabek, thoughtfully as if trying to figure out Yuri’s game. “I have to head to the gym in half hour. Aren’t you at practice?”

“Sure. I’m taking a break.”

There is silence, and it stretches until Yuri can picture the exact degree of disbelief that must be plastered on Otabek’s face. A break. As if that’s something Yuri ever entertains. But there is still hot discomfort coiling in the pit of his stomach, like the flu, but alive. Persistent. It’s been so long. He closes his eyes and, before he can think better of it, unfastens the strings of his track pants.

“It’s a little weird to talk to you without seeing you,” says Otabek, and Yuri freezes with one hand poised over the hem of his trousers. His breathing comes quicker. But of course Otabek can’t know what he’s doing, and Yuri forces his voice to remain steady.

“Yeah, like we’re pathetic old-timers who use phones to talk to people.”

Otabek breathes out a thin laugh.

“Tell me about St Petersburg,” says Yuri, and slips the tips of his fingers under the waistband of his trousers. “I kind of —” Miss it. He shuts his mouth.

“It’s the same as when I was here last, except it’s so warm this year.” He pauses, and Yuri has a moment in which he sees himself from outside of his body: curled up with his knees spread obscenely, one hand holding the phone and the other down his pants. He curls sweaty fingers around himself and doesn’t make a noise. “Yakov has me scheduled for training at the Mariinsky, with the corps. Nothing dramatic, so even a ballet heretic like me can manage. They remind me of you.”

An answer is expected. Yuri stills the movement of his hand and swallows. “Because they’re good?” He likes the way the word rolls off his tongue. He wouldn’t mind hearing it said to him, in Otabek’s low, flatly unimpressed voice. _Good_.

“And they know it,” says Otabek. “So they’re a little insufferable about it.”

The admonition does nothing to assuage Yuri’s want. Not when it’s spoken with such fondness. Yuri leans his head back against the door, knocking the top of his skull against it, and remembers how the prima had looked in that video, naked and shaking as she’d danced herself to death, the hands of anonymous onlookers dragging her back any time she’d tried to break free.

And maybe he’d been half-hard from the moment he’d seen it, and seen himself in it, and known whose hands he’d like to drag him back to centre stage. Who he’d like to hurt him, and force him.

He breathes into the receiver and says, “Keep talking,” and doesn’t wince at the sound of his own voice. “Tell me something else.”

“Where —” Otabek stops, and there is a rustle of fabric or perhaps just a gust of wind hitting his phone. “Yura. Are you…?”

“I’m alone,” Yuri tells him. He feels sweat gathering at his lower back, where the waistband of his track pants is sticking to warm skin. “And you have an hour. Tell me something else.”

“I should hang up. I don’t have time for this.”

Probably. “So go ahead, hang up. I dare you.”

A moment passes in silence, or as close to silence as Yuri can get, one hand curled around his dick, breathing open-mouthed into the empty air of the stall, where the noise of it echoes. Then, “Damn it,” says Otabek. His voice is lower, and rough from the warmth of late spring, and from the effort of keeping their conversation private. “You owe me for this.”

He doesn’t tell Yuri about St Petersburg. He tells Yuri about practice and training, about the Mariinsky corps member who had a go at him at the barre until Otabek had to ice his groin and couldn’t do stretches for two days; about the bad fall he’d taken at the rink the other day and how much it hurts to rotate his hip, and how he forces himself to skate through the pain. He describes sprains and injuries and pulled muscles, and what each of them feels like. He talks about what Yuri looks like in the videos and photos he puts online, at the barre and on ice.

Yuri barely hears the words. He lets them register and wash over him, blurring into white noise, and focusses instead on the cadence of Otabek’s voice and the feeling of his own calluses where he brings himself off; Otabek has the same calluses. The same cartography of healing bruises. Yuri’s spine aches from the awkward angle at which he is bent. Then it doesn’t matter. Air shudders out of his lungs and his mind goes blank.

When he can hear again, Otabek has gone silent and Yuri’s fingers are sticky with come, as is the hem of his fleece. He breathes in and out. Doesn’t wonder, too deeply, about anything in particular except the sudden and striking laxness of his body where before there had only been tripwire tension.

The word ‘thanks’ dies in his mouth and he laughs into the receiver instead. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“You’d better.” Otabek doesn’t sound as dizzy and relieved as Yuri feels, and his voice comes muffled. Maybe he’s covering his mouth with his hand. Maybe he’s covering his face. “I’m in public. There are _people_ here.”

“Yeah? Screw them.”

Otabek doesn’t say anything for a moment, until the moment for innuendo passes. In the silence, Yuri flexes his bare toes. The pop and crack of his right ankle echoes in the stall. Then: “I really need to go now.”

Yuri lets him.

He finds change in his pocket to get wet wipes from the vending machine, and cleans himself up as best as he can, under the circumstances. The looseness persists. He remembers reading about bloodletting, how it used to be done to calm hysterical people of foul humours. That’s what he feels like: emptied of a surplus of unnecessary emotion. A vein had been opened, and with a careful amount of blood spilled, he has room to breathe.

This time, after he gets back on ice, the routine rolls off him like something with a mind of its own, not yet polished but ready to be made into an instrument, and Viktor watches him with professional curiosity and says, once Yuri is done, sweating into the already damp fabric of his fleece: “Good. You’re beginning to get it. Now do it again.”

So Yuri braces himself for the hurt; he breathes, and skates the routine again. And again. All over again.


	3. Chapter 3

By the time October and with it the Grand Prix series roll around, Yuri knows that neither of his programs will feature a quad Axel.

He flies to Montreal with his arm in a sling, and the airport security on both ends give him grief about it, as if his sprained wrist could conceal anthrax, or a bomb. Yuuri had offered to accompany him to Fukuoka with Makkachin, but Yuri took the train. Hasetsu to Fukuoka, Fukuoka straight to Tokyo International, and he’d sat there on the train surrounded by students and people in suits and smart casual wear. No one had given him a second look in that particular way people have, when a careful misplacement of attention makes it all the more obvious that they would love to stare.

Yuri had pulled the hood of his sweatshirt lower over his eyes, and hadn’t taken it off until the metal detector.

He hurts when he gets off the plane after fourteen hours and a layover in Vancouver, but he’s been hurting for weeks now, for months. Does he ever stop hurting? A constant, low-level ache is perennially spread across his body, coalescing into sharper pains in a few places, but it isn’t dramatic, it’s the deal.

He’d sprained his wrist trying to land that quad Axel without a harness, and Viktor hadn’t even blinked, only sent him to the nearest hospital with Yuuri. Still, Yuri considers himself lucky: it’s not the worst fall he had ever taken. His first competition is the Trophée de France in two weeks, and that he’s going to skate with a healing sprain is not a question. Of course he will. He’s had worse, and the masseuse in Hasetsu that he inherited from Yuuri cleared him after only the mildest of threats and curses from Yuri’s repertoire. The only mantra he’s ever learned in absence of any real attachment to religion carries as much weight as ever: what’s a little pain?

He makes it to Montreal close to midnight, so all that’s left to do is book into the hotel and fall into bed, battling jetlag. Every step he takes on Canadian soil feels as if he’s tempting fate, as if JJ or his fiancée — perhaps wife by now, not that Yuri cares — or his family could jump out at him from behind a dark corner.

There is something freeing about coming to see a competition without competing, something dizzying and new about the knowledge that no one expects him to be here. No one at all. He hasn’t announced it, unsure of how much overlap there is between his fan club’s membership and others’. The last thing he needs is to get derailed by adoring fans.

He has a two-day off-ice training schedule on his phone, together with a diet modified to be tenable in a hotel. He doesn’t have to stay any longer than is necessary: he’s only here for the men’s free skate.

Even then, he’s not really here for the free skate, either.

…

Otabek places fourth, and it’s humiliating, as if his failure could reflect badly on Yuri. Yuri knows intellectually that Otabek wants to save his strength with the Cup of China less than a month away. That it’s a tactical sacrifice. It still smarts; Yuri has never been good at tactics.

His short program is spectacular. Yuri watches it without bothering to disguise whatever might show on his face, safe in anonymity among other spectators. He runs out of words to think, and all he knows is that working with Yakov might have been the best decision Otabek’s made in his career. The choreography fits him like a second skin, slipping easily into place over old bruises and sweat and tears. This Erlkönig is different to the training clips Yuri had seen. Still visceral, but polished, perfected, and the black of Otabek’s costume gives his silhouette a haunting contrast against the ice.

But he lands the quad Salchow two-footed and stumbles, and doesn’t quite manage to make up for it with GOE. Stumbles, again, on a triple Axel, triple toe, double toe loop combination. He places fourth, will have to fight tooth and nail for the podium after the free skate.

After the ceremony, Yuri finds him in a corridor that is like any other corridor, like a thousand corridors at rinks and stadiums and arenas, badly lit and smelling faintly of cleaning detergent and stale air.

It’s tidal to see Otabek so close and in the flesh after those months since the Grand Prix Final, almost a year later, as if Yuri is being dragged toward him with the irrevocable necessity of seawater pulled in by the moon.

“Yuri?” Otabek is blinking in surprise and exhaustion. His hair is damp with sweat. He bites his lip. “What are you doing here?”

Would he try harder to win, if he’d known that Yuri would be? Yuri doesn’t ask the question. He shrugs and drifts closer, limbs suddenly on the wrong side of clumsy. But that’s only in his head. He’s never actually clumsy. “I wanted to see your short program. You know, feel out the competition.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Surprise?” Yuri spreads his hands in half a shrug, half an aborted look-at-me gesture.

“Yakov will be here any minute, if you want to avoid running into him. And —” Otabek tilts his head, squinting with a flat scrutiny that hides whatever emotion he doesn’t want seen on his face, or in his body language. “Wow. You’re taller.” They come to stand face to face when he says it, and the evidence is incontrovertible.

Yuri doesn’t have to look down yet. Not far down, at least. He’s taller by perhaps an inch or two. Everything in him goes very still as air slowly exits his lungs and he watches Otabek’s expression, impossible to read. Yuri is taller. He feels very cold.

Otabek lifts his hand, flat like a ruler, to measure the difference in their heights: places his palm on top of his head, moves it, and the tips of his fingers just about hit Yuri’s hairline. He looks amused, for all that he never really looks amused, except in the margins of his expressions. Emotion in the didascalie.

“It’s not the end of the world,” he tells Yuri. Yuri doesn’t want to hear it. “Look at how tall Vi—”

“Whatever, look, I don’t want to talk to Yakov. He doesn’t know I’m here.” Yuri leans around Otabek, makes a production of looking down the length of the hall where there is still no sign of Yakov, if there ever will be. “And besides, I’m going back to Japan tomorrow. You wanna go somewhere?”

“I’d like to change first.”

“The hotel, then. Lead the way. There’s a metro here, right?”

Yuri follows Otabek out of the arena, past the congestion of people near the entrance, with the fans and press and JJ Leroy holding court among them as he angles himself to catch the best light. An instinctive spark of irritation makes Yuri want to hiss at the sight, call out the judges’ clearly unfair scoring, but Otabek pulls him away.

Yuri lets tension build in his joints and his bones, and it has nothing to do with how tired he is, and how anxious to get back to practice, at how stupid it is to be travelling on a whim — even a pre-planned whim — at the onset of the final stretch before the GPF. It’s nothing to do with that.

It’s Otabek. Seeing him again should have a lesser effect. Yuri should be used to it, and keep a lid on how much he maybe wants this, but he isn’t used to it at all, and all he can think is that they still haven’t touched. That Otabek hasn’t touched him yet. The months they haven’t been face-to-face seems to be how long Yuri hasn’t been touched.

He follows Otabek as though there is a hook tethered to one of his ribs, or burrowed under his sternum.

“What happened to your arm?” Otabek asks, on the metro, while they sit a respectable distance from one another like two anonymous tourists on a nighttime commute, each looking in a different direction before their attention drifts back with gravitational inevitability.

Yuri scratches the back of his neck, digs bitten nails into overwarm skin. “I tried a quad Axel without a harness.”

“Oh.” When Yuri looks up at Otabek from beneath the fall of his hair, it’s to see his expression a little odd, unfamiliar. “Did you do it?”

“Not this time,” Yuri admits. “It’ll take a while. But Viktor only started landing all his quads when he was twenty or so.”

Otabek looks away, and stays silent for a long moment. He’s twenty. It grates, that tinge of longing radiating from Otabek’s shuttered expression, as if he thinks he should be able to land the same jumps that Viktor had at his age. Viktor is in a category of his own, and Yuri knows from painful experience that had left his feet bloody and raw on more than one occasion that comparing yourself to Viktor Nikiforov is as masochistic as it is unproductive.

Unless Yuri starts landing quad Axels next season. He’s neither humble nor modest enough not to know that he’s in a category of his own, too.

He wonders if Otabek resents him. Professional jealousy, maybe. Something more, maybe. He wonders if Otabek likes him enough to make up for the resentment, or if it will come bubbling up one day, like scalding water from a kettle put to a boil. If there is anything he could do to attenuate it, let the steam out.

It’s late enough that there aren’t that many commuters around, and the train’s rattle and hum obscures Yuri’s sharp exhale. No one is looking at them, and no one cares, so Yuri can shift until his hand is closer to Otabek’s seat, and closer. He grazes the back of Otabek’s palm with his knuckles.

For a beat, Otabek doesn’t move. Then, very slowly, he rotates his hand at the wrist until — they are not holding hands. But they could be, if Yuri shifted ever so slightly. He doesn’t.

“I fucked up today.” Otabek says it in the same way someone else might comment on the state of the world’s economy. _The stock market is plummeting. Pass the salt, please._

“Everybody fucks up,” says Yuri. “I fuck up sometimes.”

“That must hurt, remembering you’re human after all.”

It does, but Yuri admits nothing.

By the time they make it to the hotel, Yuri feels a little like he does in the mornings in Hasetsu: tension spitting sparks from beneath skin, coiled in on itself without an outlet. Maybe Otabek is not the one in danger of boiling over.

He pushes Otabek into the room as soon as Otabek swipes his keycard over the lock, but not before he laughs at the threshold and knocks on the door frame and says, in a croaky falsetto, “Housekeeping!”

Otabek shuts the door, and leans against it with his arms crossed over his chest. “You don’t even clean up after yourself.”

“You’re staying here alone, aren’t you?”

Otabek nods, unnecessarily. There is only one bed in the room, unmade; a handful of sweatshirts and socks, a towel, all strewn across the floor; a closed laptop on the small bedside table. An open shrinkwrap pack of bottled water. It’s utilitarian despite the mess, and not a flicker of Otabek’s personality shines through. The room is a space as liminal as any that Yuri occupies. Maybe it would be less so with Otabek’s cat around. Yuri misses her.

He gives the room all the due attention it deserves, and turns to face Otabek, hands on his hips. “Come on, what are you waiting for? It’s been like a year.”

The corner of Otabek’s mouth twitches. “Do you want something to drink, maybe? Eat? You’re probably tired after the flight.”

“I’ll do all that when I’m dead,” says Yuri, and goes for him, lets the hook dug under his ribs pull him as far as it wants, completing its course. Gravity, that’s what it is. The incremental pull of something he has no means of fighting.

The only good thing about being slightly taller than Otabek now is that Yuri can box him in against the door, even with one arm in a sling; he leans on the other, and soon enough he will learn to coordinate his body enough to loom. If it weren’t for the sling he imagines he would bracket Otabek’s shoulders with his hands on both sides of the door. Another time. In the half-light of the room, he sees the way Otabek’s fingers close around empty air as he makes himself stay still, and tips his head back to maintain proper eye contact. It leaves his throat exposed under the collar of his runner jacket.

“So, I don’t know if you remember.” Yuri takes the jacket’s zipper between thumb and index finger, and starts to pull. “But I owe you.”

Otabek’s hair has dried, but it falls over his forehead when he looks down to follow the movement of Yuri’s hand. “Oh, I have a good memory.”

“Good. I don’t feel like doing a play by play.”

He doesn’t expect to be spun by the shoulder until it’s his back that the door is digging into, and Otabek’s weight pressing him into it. Yuri’s lungs contract at the impact. The sling lies between them like a futile chastity belt. It’s more of a bite when Otabek kisses him, closing his teeth on Yuri’s lower lip without care for whether it hurts. It does, but the hurt makes it good, and Yuri has long learned that when things hurt, it means he’s doing them right. What’s a little pain?

“ _I_ should give you a play by play,” says Otabek, words threaded through with impatience. It’s its own victory to see his control slip. His breath is warm over Yuri’s skin and Yuri folds his hands into the lapels of Otabek’s jacket, smiling his most arrogant smile. “You left me hard in the middle of Demidov Bridge. I was on weights for an hour before Yakov let me go so I could —”

He presses closer, and there is humour in the set of his mouth, but mostly there is a kind of exasperated fondness that makes Yuri want to never be looked at again. Otabek says, “You’re a selfish prick, Yuri Plisetsky.”

Yuri doesn’t see the point in arguing an obvious fact. “I’m the selfish prick who’s going to put your dick in his mouth if you shut up for five minutes.”

In the brief, stunned silence that follows, Yuri takes the opportunity to push Otabek up against the door again, tug his jacket down his arms. It lands in a heap on the floor, soon to be joined by the intricate button-infested atrocity of Otabek’s costume.

Yuri peels it off until his fingers catch on bare skin. Skin and kinesio tape, as though Otabek’s body is cast in equal measures flesh and injury. Two thick strips of tape cover his left trapezius and snake down his back, bright blue. Yuri runs his hand over the fabric. It’s warm from Otabek’s body heat. Otabek watches him do it, unflinching, presenting his damage for inspection.

There’s no time. Yuri says only, “Catch me,” as a warning before he jumps Otabek. Quite literally, and with little worry for his own safety.

Otabek catches him. Hands under Yuri’s thighs until he can take Yuri’s weight, leaning back to compensate for the strain — for Yuri’s new height, after almost a year. He’s so warm to the touch. Maybe all people are, and Yuri just forgot. The sling gets in the way, but not enough to impede Otabek: he staggers to the unmade bed and Yuri is laughing, trying to hold on, with one arm crushed between their chests and the other gripping at Otabek’s shoulder blade to keep his balance. Then, no balance is needed. Otabek tips him over onto the bed, and Yuri lands in a sprawl, grants Otabek a brief moment of smugness before hooking one foot around his knee, to pull Otabek down on top of him.

It’s ungainly. Yuri would be horrified, if anyone were to see them, if Viktor were to see them. No grace or decorum. The freedom to paw clumsily, one-handed, at the front of Otabek’s trousers is an unprecedented thrill. Otabek sputters when he misjudges the distance and, instead of kissing Yuri’s neck, gets a mouthful of his hair.

Yuri pushes him onto his back and keeps him there, with one forearm over his collar bones. He pitches himself off the bed, leaving Otabek to stare at him with ill-concealed plea, down the length of his body, mouth open on a wordless exhale.

Does Yuri know what he’s doing? He might not. But it can’t hurt more than a broken bone. Even if it’d be fine, it would be okay, if it did hurt.

He folds himself down, so that he won’t have to see Otabek’s face. As a novice, he had practised his jumps late in the evening, at an empty rink; no one to see his failure. It’s the same thing, really. Jumping without a harness, pulling through on the other side by force of will alone.

There is a muffled buzz that Yuri only vaguely recognises as a phone, set to vibrate. His or Otabek’s, buried in their discarded clothes.

“Oh,” Otabek says on an exhale when Yuri takes him in his mouth, as though it’s unprecedented for him, too. With Yuri, with anyone. Yuri won’t ask.

He sucks Otabek off slowly, sometimes for his own benefit — it’s difficult, and a little uncomfortable, and his arm gets in the way; he doesn’t know what to do with his legs, how to keep them from cramping — but sometimes for the reward of Otabek cursing and losing air like a punctured tire. Yuri can do slow. He can do excruciatingly unhurried, which is whole other beast from patient; patient he is not. But the slowness pulls at Otabek’s control, leaving emptiness in its place, to be filled with simple need that Otabek won’t make himself voice. It’s a victory to make him lose it, and Yuri only knows how to win.

The noises Otabek does voice are low and choked-off. They make him sound like a bird that has taken a fall and been left crippled. Every sigh stitched together with a little bit of pain and surprise. The rest of it Yuri tries to ignore: wet and filthy noises in the otherwise quiet hotel room.

Otabek runs his fingers through the hair spilled over the nape of Yuri’s neck, holding him, then directing him, and then finally demanding, when he steps outside the confines of his poise. He keeps demanding until Yuri’s jaw hurts, strained at the hinge. To distract himself Yuri twists his wrist, anchors himself in the sharp pain of sprained ligament.

When it’s over he swallows, because it’s what you do, apparently. He pulls off, pulls a face, and says with disdain, “Eugh.”

Otabek’s hand is still in his hair. He watches Yuri, dazed but unreadable, so Yuri lays his head on Otabek’s thigh and watches him in return. He blinks slowly. He tries not to imagine whether his mouth looks as abused as it feels.

“Was that consolation for fourth place?”

Yuri almost sneers. “Do you need to be consoled?”

“Not really. But thanks anyway.” He swipes his thumb over Yuri’s upper lip, and it’s easy for Yuri to catch it with his teeth, so he does. Licks at the pad. The inside of his mouth tastes a little awful, but he refuses to move with Otabek petting him the way you pet a cat.

His entire body twitches when Otabek curls his hand, the one he has in Yuri’s hair, into a fist. His grip is ungentle, but his gaze is steady. He asks, “What would you like me to do?”

“Don’t be so spineless,” Yuri says, bristling. How should he know? He’s never done this before. All he knows is that he’s still clothed, still untouched, waiting in the confining discomfort of his trousers. He can’t move out of Otabek’s hold, not without hurting himself. “Do whatever you want. If I don’t like it, I’ll let you know.”

So Otabek pulls him forward by the hair, and manoeuvres Yuri until the sling is less of a barrier, until Yuri is flat on his back in the spot where Otabek lay, the sheets warm from his body. A part of Yuri wishes Otabek would pay him back in kind, on his knees, but he can’t bring himself to be disappointed when instead Otabek leans over him: full weight, uncaring, heavy muscle and angles of bone. He manhandles Yuri’s injured arm out of the way only far enough to unzip his sweatshirt, ruck up the t-shirt underneath.

Otabek gets him off with his hand, and Yuri wants to see it, Otabek’s fingers around his dick, but he’s pinned. He digs his fingers into the bruise or strain that Otabek has covered with tape, but it’s not much of a deterrent. So instead he just lies back and takes it, listening to the slide of skin over skin, and the sounds of their breathing, his own getting quicker.

He thinks of how good this could be if he weren’t injured, without the sling, if there was more time and his flight back to Japan wasn’t at noon the following morning.

It’s still worth it, despite the discomfort. To feel someone else’s hands on him, and find that Otabek really does have the same calluses, like Yuri had thought. To be held down and exposed, to be vulnerable without having to perform it; no audience here to watch him fall to pieces. He shifts until his knees bracket Otabek’s hips, lifts his hand to reach for any naked skin he can touch.

“Stop squirming so much,” Otabek says, into Yuri’s clavicle as if to hide the smile obvious in his voice, and at Yuri’s stubborn “Make me,” pins Yuri’s arm to the bed, fingers tight around his wrist.

Otabek doesn’t try to make it last, with Yuri ready to buck him off at the slightest provocation. It isn’t in him to make it easy, for himself or for Otabek. It feels like the opposite of falling when he comes over Otabek’s fingers. He’s left taking in lungfuls of air and realises only belatedly that he’s twisting the sheets in his fists, until the bones hurt. He makes himself let go, and makes himself look at Otabek, who stares at him with an almost painful sincerity, flushed and dark-eyed as if he’s ready to go again.

“So you like that kind of thing, huh.” He doesn’t sound like himself. Yuri likes how hoarse his voice is, as if someone’s inexpertly sanded off the edges.

Yuri finds that he can’t speak just yet, so instead he settles for a meaningful stare.

“Take a picture. It’ll last longer.”

At that, Yuri discovers the willpower to say, “I liked you better when you talked less.” But it’s a good idea, so he shimmies out from underneath Otabek and off the bed, to get at the backpack he’d lost near the door.

He returns armed with his phone. The light is terrible, energy saving lightbulbs and nothing natural to offset the sickly yellow tinge that will inevitably plague all photos. He straddles Otabek’s thighs without asking for permission, and likes that Otabek’s hands move automatically to hold him there, palms over Yuri’s hips.

“You’re not Instagramming this,” Otabek tells him.

Yuri grins. “Personal use only.” The autofocus settles over Otabek’s face: relaxed but still opaque in a way Yuri might never get tired of trying to decipher. It’s strange that people think he’s cold or unfeeling, when it’s all in his eyes.

Yuri snaps a photo, and another for good measure, Otabek sprawled beneath him with lazy abandon, bare-chested and loose-jointed. His hair sticks up to one side, and his mouth is bitten red, and Yuri knows he will be able to find the shape of it pressed somewhere into his neck and collar bones.

Otabek’s hands snake under his shirt. It’s really too bad that Yuri can’t save feeling on film, have this exact sensation in his phone’s camera roll as a reminder.

Maybe this is what Viktor meant when he’s said: _find someone who will take your best_.

…

He wakes up from a jetlagged nap more disoriented than he’d been falling asleep, and with his mouth tasting actively vile. He wipes it with the back of one hand and tries to see what awoke him, and sees Otabek sneaking across the room to where his clothes are still strewn near the door. He picks up his phone and unlocks it. Yuri watches him, too tired and relaxed to keep his eyes fully open.

“Hello?” In English. Yuri lifts himself on one elbow, curious. “I know, I’m sorry. No, it’s okay. Something else came up.” Otabek aims a thin smile at the floor. “I can’t tell you. It’s probably not very exciting, compared to — where did you all go? No, yes, I remember. Did Isabella keep you from drinking? You sound very sober.”

Yuri knows who it is that Otabek is speaking to. He crawls out of bed, ease seeping out of him as he goes, and starts pulling on the trousers he’d discarded sometime between the first non-solitary orgasm of his life and falling asleep like a complete novice. It feels horribly fitting for JJ to invite himself, however obliquely, to whatever this is now.

“It sounds like you had a good time — okay. I’ll talk to you later.” Otabek hangs up and turns to Yuri, half in and half out of his clothes, and says, “You don’t have to go.”

“I didn’t mean to take up so much of your time.” It comes out strange and formal, even in casual second person. “You had plans with other people?”

“Yeah, but something better turned up.” Otabek crosses the room back to the bed, and drops down in front of Yuri. “And you can stay the night. If you like.”

“I have a hotel booked.”

“So? All that tells me is you have no faith in my hospitality.”

“God, when did forget how to shut _up_ ,” says Yuri, but he’s grinning as he does it, pulling Otabek up and over him, onto the bed. It takes no time at all to divest himself once again of his clothes, and his flight is at noon the next day.

Before he leaves Montreal, he buys a black faux-satin jacket with a tiger embroidered on the back. It’s tacky. It’s awful. Yuri falls in love with it immediately and without reservation, and texts a photo of it to Otabek.

> **otabek-altin** it makes you look like a mafia boss’s boytoy

In response, Yuri sends him a string of thumbs-up emoji.

…

Yuuri picks him up at the Fukuoka train station, with Makkachin in tow.

“He missed you,” he says, nodding at the dog, who doesn’t look particularly ecstatic to see Yuri, save for a perfunctory wag of his tail when Yuri pats his head and scratches his ears. Every time he pets Makkachin, he feels as if he’s sinking his fingers into candy floss.

“How was Skate Canada?” Yuuri asks.

“How do you think?” Yuri resist the urge to throw his backpack at Yuuri, and follows him through the bowels of the station in search of the connecting train to Hasetsu. English feels slightly off on his tongue, even after a short break. “That asshole JJ snagged gold with a mediocre free skate. Like anyone expected different.”

“Well, maybe he won’t do so well in Moscow — I heard he was assigned to Rostelecom, maybe it will be a fairer competition.”

“Did you watch it?”

“We saw a live stream.” Yuuri smiles behind his glasses, and the angle of light turns them opaque in a way that Yuri always found a little unsettling. It reminds him of the way Yuuri would drop his awkward politeness on ice, and a dangerous stranger would take its place. “I’m biased, but your choreography is better. You’ll do better.”

Yuri looks down at his injured arm. “I don’t have the quad Axel.”

“No one has the quad Axel. And maybe —”

Yuri looks up. “What?”

For a moment, Yuuri stops walking. Makkachin’s leash goes tense as he walks too far out, so he stops, too, and starts sniffing at a patch of concrete without turning to look at his owner. “Ah. Well, maybe Viktor wants you to master it because he never mastered it. But that’s not good for either of you, not if that’s how you think about it. You already got injured, and Viktor…”

“Viktor what,” Yuri says, once it seems that Yuuri might not finish.

Yuuri shrugs, and turns away. “I love him, and he’s one of the best choreographers I ever saw, but I don’t think you should let him use you to live out some things he never got to do. Like those quad Axels. Sooner or later someone could get hurt, and I don’t want to have to patch you up.”

Briefly, Yuri hates English. He can’t tell which ‘you’, singular or plural, Yuuri means. He wishes they could speak Russian, but Yuuri’s Russian is still bad enough that it only makes Yuri want to throttle him.

“I won’t come crying to you.”

“Oh, I know. It’s probably a good thing, I would be terrible if I tried to help.”

Throughout their conversation Yuri wonders if he’s being treated differently. If perhaps Yuuri knows, can tell that Yuri had sex by some undefined change in Yuri’s countenance or behaviour. Then he realises how absolutely maudlin and disgraceful it sounds, even inside his own head, and makes himself stop wondering.

It doesn’t feel like coming home when they make it back to Yu-topia, not even when Mrs Katsuki gives Yuri an effusive, unsolicited hug, and Yuuri diligently translates her Japenese: “Mum always worries when I travel, but she felt like I’m too old to worry about. You’re still young, so now she’s going to worry about you. When you travel, I mean.”

Yuri doesn’t have it in him to get angry. He’s too tired for it, after another fourteen hours on planes. All because he took Viktor’s advice to heart. He’ll never tell Viktor that it was worth it.

Mrs Katsuki and Yuuri let him go, and Yuri doesn’t escape into the privacy of his room upstairs, not quite. It’s not an escape.

There is something he needs to do.

The screen doors slide shut behind him, and Yuri breathes. He braces himself, and breathes, and takes his phone out of his pocket before cowardice can get the better of him. After three rings, there is a click, and a gruff voice saying, “Yes, hello?” in Russian.

Yuri breathes again. “His name is Otabek Altin, you can look him up. He’s from Almaty.” Maybe Yuri closes his eyes, to be able to speak. He doesn’t think about how thin the walls are in the onsen, and who might accidentally overhear. “He won silver in Pyeongchang, when I — when I couldn’t compete. And he’s not that much older. And you might not want to know, but you should, because — because —”

That’s where he runs out of air, and resolve. There is a terrible, burning sensation under his eyelids, so Yuri squeezes his eyes shut and rubs his thumb over the bridge of his nose. Otherwise he will hurt himself, knock his injured wrist into a solid surface, just for the distraction.

Breathe, Yurochka.

His grandfather is silent for a long moment. In the background, Yuri can hear television, and a whistling kettle that his grandfather doesn’t move to take off the stove, though it might be coming from the apartment next-door, bleeding through thin walls.

“When Svetlana met that man, she was your age. She was so in love. I wanted to meet him — my daughter, talking about anything other than skating! I was so happy. I thought she had found someone who’d stay with her for good. Your mother, she’s not —” Over the line, Yuri hears his grandfather swallow, the kind of compulsive contraction of the throat that’s more about stalling than anything else. “You know she’s not easy, in some ways. You take after her. But you’re both easy to love. That man, he never loved her.”

It’s more words strung together about the man who is, or was, Yuri’s father than Yuri has ever heard, and the information leaves him uneasy. Does he even have a right to pry into his mother’s business? She never mentioned Yuri’s father, as though Yuri had sprung from her without any outsider input like Athena from Zeus’ head.

“That’s got nothing to do with me,” he says.

“I don’t want what happened to her to happen to you. If I meet this Altin boy,” says his grandfather, “and he breaks your heart, I’ll find out where he lives.”

“Dedushka, it’s okay if he does. It’s what happens.” There it is again, that awful feeling. Worse than any broken bone, worse than failure. Yuri wipes at his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “Would you really meet him?”

After a long moment, his grandfather sighs. “Cook for him, too. You skaters, there’s never enough meat on your bones. And if he’s from Almaty, he’ll appreciate good food. I’ll make him flatbread and those dumplings that they like; if he comes after winter, lamb won’t be as expensive, and —”

Yuri lets the sound of his grandfather’s voice wash over him and feels as if, for the first time since he’d last tried to bring Otabek into a conversation between them, there is enough air in his lungs that he won’t choke. _There’s someone. He’d better not hurt you._ No need to brace himself any more, so Yuri relaxes, and grills his grandfather about the weather in Moscow, and whether he’d watched the videos that Yuri had posted online, and accepts the promise that his grandfather will look up Otabek’s past routines to get a better feel for him.

Once he hangs up, Yuri can even think of his mother. The place inside him that had always hurt at the thought of her is long gone numb, cauterised and scarred over, but now he can’t even bring himself to remember that belligerent phantom pain.

He stares at his contacts list for a long time, her name written out with impersonal formality: Svetlana Plisetskaya. Yuri wonders if his name in her phone carries the same distance. Or if, perhaps, to her he is simply _Yuri_.

He doesn’t call.

He doesn’t leave his room for the rest of the day, and the next morning when he stomps down the stairs to the kitchen, Yuuri is already gone, he and Viktor and the dog, and Mrs Katsuki welcomes Yuri back with a string of kind-sounding Japanese to which he can only nod along, and sees him out of the onsen with packed lunch. It could be motherly.

If Yuri let it.


	4. Chapter 4

“Yurio, stop squirming so much.”

It’s spoken in English and so doesn’t sound at all like an echo of Otabek’s words from two months prior, but Yuri goes hot all over anyway. He almost moves. He doesn’t. If he’s been thinking on and off about Skate Canada, driving himself to distraction remembering the cadence of Otabek’s hands on him, bringing him off, then no one will ever know. Yuri can’t be discreet, and so it can’t be the better part of his valour, but he covers for it with bluster.

He kicks his feet into the air, affecting a bored scowl. “It’s not my fault you’re taking forever. Hurry up before I die of old age.” His muttering is almost drowned out in the noise that the clippers are making in the empty bathroom.

“I can stop now,” says Yuuri reasonably, “and then you can skate in the GPF with half of your hair. You could set a new fashion. Your fan club would love it.”

“Ugh,” says Yuri. Yuuri presses the clippers against the hollow at the base of his skull, and Yuri bends his head forward for ease of access.

The tiled floor under his feet is littered with strands of wheat-gold hair. Yuri never bothered to cut it short enough to actually need upkeep, and neither has he ever grown it out long enough to get in the way. It’s always been about convenience, another part of his body taken hostage in the service of winning. No superfluous distractions.

Cutting his hair is like that, too. It fits with the theme of his free skate. He has staggered commentators and fellow competitors alike, taking first and second place in Trophée de France and the NHK Trophy, qualifying for the Grand Prix Final in the comfort of the top three. His program has the media hailing Viktor’s choreography as an ice-bound mixture of Balanchine and Forsythe. They call him a daring possibly-lunatic for hinging his protégé’s success on routines that push the boundaries of decorum, with a touch of the experimental. But it works. Yuri is the one who makes it work.

Last year’s failure sits like oily residue in the back of his mouth, the taste of defeat and his body’s betrayal.

If the theme of his free skate is change and sacrifice, then for the Final, he can change. It’s only hair, he can grow it back out if he wants.

When Yuuri finishes and the clippers switch off, the absence of their buzz is a noise on its own accord.

Without thinking Yuri reaches up to run his palm over the back of his head. Not shaved, short but not dramatically so; it feels nothing like the familiar scratch of Otabek’s buzzcut. Different. Yuuri had cut most of his hair down at the back, taken two or three inches at the front.

In the mirror, Yuri sees a scowling stranger, but then it passes. Above and to the side of him, Yuuri surveys his handiwork with a pleased half-smile. Yuri flicks his hair out of his eyes, but most immediately falls back down. No change there, then.

It’ll do.

Viktor’s expression when he sees Yuri, afterwards, is one that looks like the complementary half of a face that Yuuri would wear.

“And here I thought you wouldn’t manage to surprise me,” he says, turning Yuri by the shoulders to one side, then the other, like a show dog. “You look older like this.”

Yuri rolls his eyes and lets himself be manhandled. “I _am_ older.”

“Hold that thought until you can at least buy alcohol legally.”

“Why would I need to when I’ve got you and Katsudon?”

Viktor blinks. Then smiles, knowing and so fully present that Yuri is thrown out of the train of his thoughts. It’s as if Viktor sees him for the first time in weeks, in months, as a person and not an instrument. He runs his hand through Yuri’s hair, catching at the nape; the gesture should not be reminiscent of Yakov, but somehow, the easy familiarity and offhand affection make Yuri’s throat close up.

He knocks Viktor’s hand away, glaring, and Viktor only laughs.

…

“— groundbreaking choreography,” the journalist is saying, her mike thrust in Yuri’s face like an offensive weapon. “And obviously you’ve changed your image since the last competition — was that an artistic decision? How much input did you have in your routines? How are you finding your comeback season?”

Yuri can barely see for the sweat in his eyes, already uncomfortable makeup caked by stage lights into a mask. He tries on a vacant smile that must look more like a snarl, and all he can feel is the crushing comedown of adrenaline; his skates feel like mediaeval foot screws. The mike is still in his face. He’s expected to provide an answer. He tries to remember what the question was.

“I worked very hard to master the programs, I’m doing my best to represent my country and make everyone who depends on me proud,” he says, mouth moving on automatic to spill out half-nonsense in English that he barely understands himself. “Um — it’s an honour to train under Viktor Nikiforov and make his choreography come alive on ice.”

“Everyone is very excited to see your free skate the day after tomorrow. Have there been any changes made? Nikiforov is known for his last minute surprises.”

“I’ll try to maintain a high standard of performance,” Yuri says. All he can hear is Stride La Vampa reverberating through his skull; it was the last time he will skate the short program until Worlds, with Georgi bound for Europeans. In his head, he’s hours ahead, pulling himself through a final rehearsal for the free skate. He spots a familiar silhouette in the back of the foyer, and, relieved, dodges out of the way of the journalist’s mike. “Excuse me.”

He makes his way past clusters of excited competitors, journalists and spectators. Someone takes a picture of him and Yuri resists the urge to give the finger to the camera, and there is a high-pitched wail as someone more glamorous enters the foyer to a chorus of worshipful sighs.

Yuri hasn’t seen Otabek off the ice and its immediate vicinity yet. There had only been enough time to wish him luck, so Yuri had taken the opportunity to threaten him with bodily violence if he didn’t do well enough. Otabek did well enough: he came in first after the short program, beating Yuri by nine points, and Yuri cannot find in himself the resolve to be angry. When Otabek’s points had flashed across the monitors, Yuri grinned so widely, and so meanly, that he thought it might break his face.

He has been missing this since he’d dropped out last season, which was Yuuri’s last season. Since Viktor had announced his definitive retirement.

Competing with someone worth the effort of pushing himself, and hurting himself, and punishing himself. A mirror against which to throw every fracture and injury, every sore and blister, and claw his way to the top. Someone to make the obsession worth it, in absence of childlike wonder. Someone who understands and is in it to win, and for whom the easy fun of skating has been over for as long as it has for Yuri.

But it’s not Otabek, lurking in the part of the foyer with the least number of journalists. Uncharacteristically, it’s JJ. Yuri can feel his hackles rising, and he stomps the rest of the way over. JJ had dropped out of the running after a disastrous fall during his free skate in Rostelecom; he’d asked to complete the routine after being cleared by the paramedics, but his score had taken such a massive hit that he might as well not have bothered.

Yet he’s here, now, dressed casually and wearing sunglasses indoors, the movie star smirk turned down so as not to be blinding.

“What are you doing here?” Yuri demands. JJ lowers his sunglasses until they rest on the tip of his nose, and he can look Yuri up and down from beneath the peak of his ridiculous snapback, hanging his gaze meaningfully on Yuri’s short hair.

Then he shrugs. “I came to see my friends and rivals compete, of course.”

“And why are you dressed like a creepy pervert?”

“What? It’s called being incognito, Yuri. Incognito.”

“You’re wearing a _belt_ with your _initials_.”

“Been checking out the crown jewels, have we?” Yuri doesn’t want to know what that is supposed to mean. The exaggerated leer makes it clearer than he’d like. “It’s okay, I understand. We all have our weaknesses — I’m willing to live with being yours.”

“You make no sense,” Yuri says through half-clenched teeth, and turns on his heel. “Whatever. I don’t care. Be here if you want, I’m leaving, I have a free skate to practice.”

“Hey, Yuri.”

Very slowly, Yuri turns back around. It occurs to him that even though he’s taller than Otabek now, JJ still has a few inches of him. Nothing is fair. “Yes? Talk.”

“What’s it like working with Viktor?”

It isn’t the question Yuri was expecting, and JJ doesn’t seem to be joking: he’s looking at Yuri with a sort of honest curiosity that he might not admit to, like a cat, butting its face where it doesn’t belong only to sniff and turn away when called on it.

It gives Yuri pause. He looks around, quick and furtive, to see if no one is listening in, and says: “Like nothing else. And if you tell him I said that, I’ll kill you and feed your body to ants.”

Now, JJ grins. Twenty thousand volts of a too-even smile. “I would never,” he says, which naturally means that he will, given half a chance, but Yuri would expect nothing less.

It has to be the first time he turns his back on JJ Leroy without wanting to hurt something.

…

He doesn’t find Otabek after the short program. He doesn’t find Otabek for the rest of the evening, until the tension in him is such that he can feel the lactic acid buildup in every major muscle group. Absurd, and unlikely, but that’s what it feels like. Current with no outlet.

Viktor lets him have the evening to himself, promising a world of hurt if Yuri is late to practice in the morning, and so Yuri clocks in an hour with the physical therapist — a terrifying woman who has nothing on Lilia, or even Yuri’s masseuse in Japan — and limps back to his hotel room, aware of his body in crippling, morbid detail. Every crack and pop of bone, every creak of joints realigning. The strange constriction of his lungs, when he twists his torso the wrong way and something seems to catch in his larynx.

He stretches until he can’t feel his body, on the floor in the middle of the room, watching cat video compilations. Then he takes every towel that came with his room, rolls them all thickly together, and props his right foot up before slowly lowering himself into a front oversplit. It hurts, but it always hurts at the start, and so Yuri braces himself. He breathes. The hurt subsides, and he relaxes into the burning stretch an inch at a time, until he can no longer see the phone in his hands and blood rushes through him, an afterimage.

It’s so quiet outside of his body. It’s so loud inside.

His phone vibrates in his hand. Yuri is swiping to accept the incoming video chat before it registers.

“I couldn’t find you,” he tells Otabek. “Asshole. I had to suffer JJ instead.”

Otabek doesn’t roll his eyes, but his expression conveys very clearly that he would if only he were a little more demonstrative. It takes Yuri a moment to realise what’s in the background behind him, and then the vague uneven shape resolves itself into a bedcover, Otabek sitting on the floor with his back to the bed. Yuri adjusts his position for a better angle.

“I didn’t hear sirens and Twitter hasn’t exploded, it can’t have been that bad. Did you get into a slapfight like last time?”

“Fistfight.”

Otabek raises his eyebrows.

“Where the hell are you, anyway? I thought we could — I don’t know.” Yuri scratches the bridge of his nose, to offset the blush he knows must show in unattractive splotches over his face. “Go somewhere. I’ve got tomorrow off after practice, I’ve never been to Turin. We could do touristy shit.”

“There’s a square with a horse,” says Otabek, squinting at nothing as though trying to remember information he’d heard before. “But I can’t, I have PT after practice and a promotional thing for the Tourism Industry Department.”

“Are they going to put your face on airplanes or something?”

“Would you visit me in Almaty if they did?”

Yuri opens his mouth to reply before he registers the meaning, and that it is as close to an open invitation as Otabek has ever come. He has to focus on the twinge in his right knee to keep his face still, bite the tip of his tongue to keep his mouth flat. He says, “You never came to Japan.”

“They didn’t assign me to the NHK Trophy.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Otabek looks down and up. His eyes are thin at the corners, the only concession he makes in lieu of smiling. “I know,” he says.

They’re rivals, first and foremost. Yuri doesn’t ask why Otabek didn’t come to Japan, when he knows what the answer will be: busy timetable, and no willingness to carve some time out from the constraints of a training regimen. Yuri wouldn’t sacrifice an hour he could spend on-ice, and he thinks it would make him a monster if he asked it of Otabek. It would make him something worse if Otabek agreed.

“After the free skate tomorrow, after the ceremony. Okay?” There is a rustle, tinny and flat, when something brushes up against the speakers of Otabek’s phone as he shifts. In that moment Yuri wants to reach out and touch him more than he wants the gold. It leaves him paralysed, as if he’d taken a fall, suspended in the second of breathless terror.

“Okay,” he says. Nonchalant. He wonders how easily Otabek can see, or hear, through his pretences. “Yeah. Okay.”

…

It’s strange to sit in the kiss and cry with Viktor. It’s stranger to think that Otabek sat there with Yakov after his turn waiting for the score to come up, but thoughts of Otabek are distant and indefinite, and Yuri can’t split his attention is more than one direction, not now.

Not even if he wanted to.

He and Viktor are both so still that Yuri thinks the air around them might develop some kind of gravity of its own. He can’t make himself look at Viktor, not when Viktor exudes the same kind of tension as when he’d been in Yuri’s place waiting for the score.

Yuri had skated second to last. He can still feel the thrum of the music, trying to pull at the strings of his body and propel him back on ice, slave to the choreography and thematic catharsis, and sacrifice. He can’t feel his feet, or his thighs, and his knee throbs with a sharp, stabbing pain from where he’d bent too far on one edge and pulled at the place where the ligament had been torn. It almost doesn’t matter whether he wins; he will always be the one to make history with a total of four quads in a single free skate, two in combination, each landed. He hadn’t staggered once. But of course it matters.

It had been so quiet, even though they’d all seen him after Yuuri had cut his hair, skating his short program. Yuri had never felt more, and never like this: a connection to the music beyond the formality of the routine, hungry and demanding, like his Agape two years prior, but more. More everything. Painful and exhausting and brutal, and worth every second. Worth it for the catharsis.

His composition and interpretation marks might suffer, but it’s another sacrifice, and one that Viktor had anticipated, and countered, pre-emptively, with the technical difficulty of his chosen jumps. He’d drilled Yuri to push for high GOE and not slow the step sequence and spins, to go for a trickier jump entrance any time he thinks he might pull it off, save his strength for the second half to give his component score a boost. To push until something gives, and then push harder.

It’s taking ages. Perhaps there is a disagreement, or a delay. Every second seems to last a year.

“Come on, _please_ ,” Yuri whispers, staring at the screen and willing the judging panel to hurry. He takes in a breath, holds it, bracing himself for the pain.

The numbers come up. For a second, Yuri can’t see them.

Then Viktor exhales, very loudly, his breath escaping as if from a punctured lung. The numbers on screen coalesce into Yuri’s free skate score.

He screams.

Everything fades into high-pressure, brightly coloured stimuli. There is a moment in which he launches himself at Viktor the way he would have launched himself at Yakov last year, hanging on to him and yelling into his ear; there is a moment in which Viktor hugs him back, grinning for the camera as if it’s his own score. A moment of shaky dignity as Viktor shuffles them both out of the kiss and cry and Yuri has to come up with a soundbite for the journalist waiting to take notes, visibly thrilled to be first in line for it, ‘Eurosport’ printed beneath her name on her pass.

As soon as they’re out of earshot of the reporters, Viktor spins Yuri by the shoulders. He says, “I told you, didn’t I? There are still world records in you.”

Yuri can’t speak for the clench in his throat: it’s taken his voice hostage. As if he jumped and hasn’t yet come down. There isn’t even a little pain.

“Yura!”

He turns to see Yakov rushing down the hall toward them, Lilia and Mila hot at his heels, and Otabek trailing them all with a peculiar blankness to his expression, pleased but not entirely pleased, and even that can’t chip away at Yuri’s elated adrenaline high.

He lets himself be crushed in Yakov’s embrace, lets Lilia cluck her tongue the way she would over a prize horse, criticising his technique and the depth of his splits and the turnout of his support leg in arabesque, which isn’t arabesque in this discipline, but Yuri has no words or strength left to argue. He lets them both congratulate him on a world record, and lets Mila ruffle his hair, still stiff and uncomfortable from the styling torture that the makeup artist had put him through. He even lets Yakov congratulate Viktor, the two of them talking over Yuri’s head, until all noise and commotion fades into the background to be tangled with the rest of Yuri’s emotion, remote and inaccessible, and his gaze slides inexorably to Otabek.

In third place, after Yuri’s free skate.

Yuri extricates himself from Yakov’s hold. “Listen, I —”

He doesn’t know what to expect. Everything is too loud, too rapid, his world focussed into a needlepoint of primary colours, and he tries to flinch away when Otabek moves toward him. It’s too late. Otabek grabs him by the shoulders and wraps his arms around Yuri, a little uncomfortable with Yuri some two inches taller. Yuri isn’t used to being hugged by people shorter than he is. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, or the rest of his body, held awkwardly in an unasked-for embrace. People must be staring. Heat rushes to his face.

Everything is quiet, inside and out.

“You did it,” Otabek says. He sounds proud. Bittersweet.

Yuri breathes, and breathing proves a mistake. Suddenly everything he’s held at bay comes rushing back, and he buries his face in Otabek’s neck. It’s all he can do to hold on, hard enough that it must hurt them both. His hands go to the back of Otabek’s team jacket, clawing at the fabric; maybe his hands are shaking, maybe his shoulders hitch with each inhale. His eyes burn, his body a traitor to the last, so he lets the feeling spill out before it can drown him. He squeezes his eyes shut and finds shelter in all the solid warmth at his fingertips. Otabek isn’t so much holding him as he is holding Yuri up.

One muscle group at a time, Yuri relaxes. Music filters in first, just a lacklustre, vacuous echo of it from the rink. Yuri can’t focus enough to remember who is skating his free program now. Rational thought is still a little beyond his reach.

Otabek is the first to let go, reluctant but implacable: he circles Yuri’s biceps with his hands and delicately pushes him back. Once they stand less than a step apart but touching only in the two points that Otabek allows, the press of his palms against clothed curve of muscle, Yuri forgets what he was going to say. He hates to know what his face must look like, flushed, raw with emotion, and that they are not alone, and won’t be for hours.

Otabek carefully takes his face between his hands, the way you hold brittle china, with quiet reverence.

“I’ll see you on the podium,” says Yuri, once he finds his voice, and leans forward to circumvent Otabek’s hold and kiss him.

“There is no _time_ ,” someone complains behind him, the reminder of others’ presence making Otabek balk, slightly, so Yuri fists one hand in the lapel of his jacket and, with the other, gives their merry onlookers the finger.

When he pulls back, Otabek no longer looks as though an incautious touch might break him. He nods to Yuri; and again to himself.

Shortly, on the podium, Yuri is being handed flowers and a medal that he accepts with as much savoir faire as he can muster despite wearing a headband with cat ears, gifted to him by his fan club. He accepts his dues and smiles for the cameras until the ISU officials step back and he can reach to his side and seize Otabek’s hand in his, throw them up into the air, triumphant.

At his other flank Michele looks ready to vibrate out of his own skin; it’s one of his first medals, and Yuri suspects that his bloated score will cause a similar kind of controversy to JJ’s from Barcelona. But they are in Turin, and politics will prevail. Yuri cares about it with only a detached sense of injustice on Otabek’s behalf, but no one ever promised them that the realities of their discipline would be kind.

He holds Otabek’s hand up in a viselike grip until Otabek finally allows himself to relax next to Yuri, and stops looking as if he’d prefer to be anywhere else.

The stage lights are blinding. It’s all worth it.

…

At the end of it all, Yuri can’t feel much of anything. Periodically his phone starts to buzz in his pocket, inevitably carrying more congratulations and requests and boring, pointless chit-chat, so Yuri ignores it. He ignores it knowing that one of those messages or missed calls could — would — be from Yuuri. He doesn’t want to know, yet, whether and how Yuuri will congratulate him on beating his world record. Not until he can rid himself of a tinge of guilt that emerges once reality sinks in.

Viktor doesn’t mention it. He mingles with skaters and coaches and a few choreographers who want to rip into him with the fervent fixation of artists pushed off their self-erected pedestals. They love him, they hate him for being better, they want to scoop his brain out of his skull and prod at the talent, and they forget that Yuri is the one who actually skated the programs. He’s the one who won.

For the first time in his life, Yuri doesn’t mind being overlooked in favour of Viktor Nikiforov.

He appears in all the obligatory selfies. The edges of his grudging smile are dulled by champagne that, technically, he’s not forbidden from drinking, even if it earns him a few frowns, and a few permissive waves of the hand: boys will be boys.

After an undeterminable number of hours, Yuri hides in a bathroom. It’s less than one hour, as likely as not, but time at social events such as these tends to decompress, and leech more energy from Yuri than it should. He locks himself in a stall and finally takes his phone out of his pocket.

He doesn’t read the notifications. Just scrolls past them, selectively blind to the names attached to each call or message timestamp, until he finds the one number he’s looking for, and types, _meet me back at the hotel. now or never_.

He’s tapping one foot impatiently on the tiled floor, knee jerking up and down with the motion, for a full minute. When his phone pings, he swipes the message open before the notification fully appears on the screen.

> **otabek-altin** then hop to.

There’s no one for him to say goodbye to, and no one who will miss him.

Yuri doesn’t need to think about his knee until the precise moment in which he has to. He’s getting out of the metro station when his right leg folds at the joint, one unguarded step and he nearly falls. There is no helping it, and he limps through the pain until he can fake a confidence he doesn’t feel. He grits his teeth and thinks of the gold, what he’d told Viktor: _it’s what happens_. The integrity of his body has always been a toll gladly paid, and it isn’t as though he will do this forever.

He and Otabek are, a little atypically, not staying at the same hotel. Yuri finds his way around after soliciting help from Google Maps and a pedestrian.

By the time he makes it there he’s limping again, and when Otabek opens the door to his room, his gaze drops immediately to the set of Yuri’s hips, the tense way he’s holding himself together, as if on a frayed tether.

Yuri invites himself in.

“You look like shit,” he says, and Otabek lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug. The truth is that he doesn’t, quite, look awful. Just tired, with stark bruises beneath his eyes and a scarceness to his expression that Yuri doesn’t want to have to decipher. How much must it have hurt to come in third? But he made the podium.

He locks the door behind Yuri. “You look worse.”

This, Yuri knows to be the truth.

“Everyone wanted a selfie. I should charge people. When did you leave?”

“Half an hour in. Everyone wanted a selfie.” He gives Yuri a small, private quarter-smile, and helps Yuri out of his jacket. Throws it over the back of a chair, thus ruining the affected air of chivalry, but Yuri never thought him chivalrous to begin with. “Do you want to go somewhere? You said you want to see Turin.”

Yuri presses his palms into his eyes, until he sees starbursts, and says, “Not really. Maybe tomorrow, before the gala. I just — can we —”

“Sleep?” Otabek finishes for him. Relief makes his voice thin.

“God, _please_.”

They waste precious minutes getting rid of the most obstructive of their clothes: Yuri peels himself out of his sweatshirt and jeans and kicks both to the side, not caring where they end up, and Otabek only leaves his shirt and underwear on. Exhaustion makes the edges of Yuri’s vision hazy, and his movements sluggish. But Otabek is no better, and they navigate each other with more instinct than conscious thought, a familiarity that should still be striking, but fades into the background, matter of fact.

There is nothing hot or arousing about it, being half-naked like this, but the easy intimacy of undressing in front of someone without the anticipation of sex or training makes Yuri a little lightheaded.

He only pauses when he catches sight of Otabek’s feet, and by then they’re half in and half out of bed. Yuri drops to the floor and his right knee gives once again. His fall is uneven. A stagger that he doesn’t hide.

Otabek’s feet are a mess, swathed in adhesive plaster and blisters, some partly healed and some partly torn, worse than Yuri’s at the height of the pre-season ballet training. His left ankle is bruised livid purple tinged with green, a large semicircular blotch, the kind leftover from a contusion set deeply into flesh. The kind that needs time to drift to the surface-skin.

Yuri prods the bruise with the tips of his fingers, lightly, but it’s enough to make Otabek hiss in a breath through his teeth. The muscles in his shin and thigh are rigid, and Yuri realises it’s with the effort of keeping his leg still, within Yuri’s reach. He’s turned away, exposing the tense column of his throat.

Yuri stands, and pushes Otabek back to the bed, and gets in after him to sit cross-legged at the opposite end, with plenty of unneeded space between them. Very gently, he places both of Otabek’s feet in his own lap. His first touches are circumspect: thumbs applying pressure to the sole and instep of Otabek’s right foot, pressing steadily into taut skin stretched over tendons.

Otabek is breathing slowly, in and out. Mouth open, eyes shut.

Like this, unseen, Yuri allows himself to observe without being observed in return, voyeur to a vulnerability he never thought he’d see. Otabek has gone pale from exhaustion, and in the low light of his hotel room he seems almost pallid. Each crook and slant of bone more pronounced, the rest of him hollow and cast in shadow. There is so much hurt Yuri inflict. One wrong move and he would take Otabek out for the rest of the season.

Yuri switches to the other foot. This time he elicits a noise.

After five minutes, “Okay, okay, enough,” Otabek manages through clenched teeth, chest rising and falling. “I’m fine.”

So Yuri lets him go and drops next to him on the bed. Their knees bump together and Yuri can’t find a position that is comfortable, so he settles for one that’s tenable. It leaves them arranged like parentheses facing the wrong sides, angled toward each other. Otabek’s sheets smell like him and like industrial detergent. He lifts one hand to run it through Yuri’s hair, and where before his fingers would catch and pull at tangles, now they don’t.

“I’ll grow it out again,” says Yuri. He leans into the touch like a cat, arching into it when he feels the press of Otabek’s nails at the back of his neck, the lightest pressure. He lets it anchor him in his own body.

“You don’t have to. It looks good.” Otabek glances down, for a second, then up again, and doesn’t smile, but he could. The suggestion is there. “You look good.”

It’s almost like an afterthought when he reaches for Yuri with his other hand, and starts to fumble with Yuri’s boxers, clumsy with exhaustion. Yuri returns the favour without thinking about it, not quite lazy in his movements. Uncoordinated. They get each other off without hurry, just to slip into the nowhere point of closeness where it doesn’t matter that they are both a little sweaty, wrung out, Otabek gasping wordlessly into Yuri’s hair, Yuri biting down on his collar bone to keep from voicing the sounds that want out of his lungs.

Afterwards, there’s nothing to say. Otabek strips out of his t-shirt to clean them both up, if only a little. Yuri burrows into his side and lets Otabek throw the covers over them, paw gracelessly at the wall above the bedside table until he hits the light switch and the room plunges into darkness.

“I love watching you win.” That’s the last thing Yuri hears before he passes out.

He wakes sometime in the night to the feeling of Otabek pressed flush against his back and hard against his thigh. Yuri wrenches himself out of a groggy haze, enough to appreciate it. His right knee is locked up, cramping with pain, but he ignores the discomfort. He rocks his hips back experimentally, shifts slightly, and Otabek sighs in his sleep, tightens the hold he has over Yuri’s ribcage.

Yuri twists in his hold, and starts nosing at his neck, the skin there warm and dry from sleep. He navigates by touch, blind in the darkness. “Hey. Hey, c’mon.”

Otabek tries to talk, waking halfway, but it comes out as an indistinct _mnrgh_ sound that makes Yuri smile, and press that smile into the hard ridge of Otabek’s clavicle.

“Wake up,” says Yuri, very reasonably, under the circumstances, and lightly knocks his fist into Otabek’s abdomen, “before I get bored and go jerk off in the bathroom.”

Otabek startles into full wakefulness. “Right. No, don’t do that.”

“Then impress me,” says Yuri, and rolls onto his back, and digs his fingers into the warm living flesh of Otabek’s shoulders to make him follow.

It’s dark, and in the dark Yuri doesn’t have to feel like an impostor in his own skin. He can just feel. Otabek is a smudge of deeper shadow beside him, then above him, his silhouette delineated through motion; Yuri can’t see his face. He feels Otabek nipping at his exposed shoulder, the curve of bone, lower, down Yuri’s torso. Yuri smooths his hand over the top of Otabek’s head, from forehead to the back, threading his fingers through soft short hair. Closes them into a fist, and pushes Otabek down.

He keeps his hand over Otabek’s head, directing him in wordless benediction. Otabek’s teeth graze the jut of his hip bone, then the vulnerable skin of his inner thighs, and Yuri inhales sharply, then has to keep taking in shallow, choppy breaths.

It isn’t slow this time, when Otabek blows him, or an afterthought. It’s better, it’s focussed. Without sight, Yuri can only go by hearing and by touch, and he hears every filthy sound. He feels every synapse firing inside his brain, connecting thought to action, his other hand twisted into the sheets and then clamped over his mouth. Otherwise he’ll make sounds of his own, and they would be unbearable, they would be pleading.

It takes so little to pull him over the edge that he thinks for a second something must be wrong with his perception of time, but no: all he needs is to listen to the slap and slide of skin when Otabek starts bringing himself off, without any assistance from Yuri. How selfish of him. But that’s it. The dark, Otabek taking him as deeply as he can without choking, all of the breathy little noises muffled with his mouth busy.

After Yuri is finished and Otabek wipes his mouth and chin with the edge of a sheet, Yuri has to bring him closer. He has to touch the bow of Otabek’s mouth and imagine it bruised; has to swallow compulsively around a moan when Otabek licks the pad of his thumb.

In the larger scheme it’s not very noteworthy, but Yuri has never been more exposed, or closer to someone. He thinks that if anything breaks him, it won’t be an injury, it won’t be physical damage.

They fall asleep again without bothering to clean up, the punctuation of their bodies changed into parentheses facing the same direction. This time Yuri plasters himself to Otabek’s back, skin to slightly sweaty skin, every bone and angle and the parts of him that aren’t all unyielding, too.

…

On Sunday, after the gala, Yuri and Viktor fly back to Fukuoka. Yuri can still taste sex under his tongue, an echo that reminds him of saltwater in texture; or a nick, a small laceration that won’t heal for as long as he thinks about it, and prods at it. It won’t heal for a long time.

They have a six hour layover in Beijing, and once they exit the arrivals gate and begin to make their way toward departures, with nothing and no one more important to see in the city than even those transient few hours of repose, Viktor stops at a bright poster nestled in-between several others. It advertises Beijing as the site of the 2022 Winter Olympics, from what Yuri can infer; the overall message is all he gets. One corner is peeling, the paper shrinking in on itself as if someone put a lighter to it.

“Well,” says Viktor, looking at the poster and not at Yuri, “there’s still a bit of time, isn’t there?”

Despite Viktor’s initial email, the one that skewed the trajectory of Yuri’s career all those months ago, Yuri hadn’t thought that he might still be training under Viktor by 2022. Their time in Hasetsu had always seemed finite, a passing whim for Viktor. For them both, perhaps.

But Viktor had been right, and he kept his promise, and throughout the entirety of his comeback season thus far Yuri hasn’t finished a competition off the podium. Suddenly, he wants nothing else than to train with Viktor until he retires. Either of them. It’s a humbling realisation, to know that his records might be Viktor’s work: the work of his hands, moulding Yuri into something capable of more emotion and affect that he’d ever thought possible.

What a mortifying epiphany to have in the middle of an airport.

They’re at a cafe when Yuri’s phone rings.

Viktor is eating his gluten-free croissant with the zeal of a man who just discovered religion, although perhaps it’s more that he’s scrolling through his Instagram feed, and it seems that Yuuri has employed his loneliness and boredom in the service of posting as many pictures of Makkachin wearing bizarre hats as bandwidth will allow.

Yuri digs his phone out of his bag. He’d turned it on by reflex once they got off the first plane. He didn’t think, and now he stops thinking, too, when he sees the name on the screen.

He accepts the call with shaking fingers, acutely aware that Viktor is right here with him, seeing this. Hearing his part of a conversation that might be very short, and more than a little awful.

“Mom?” Yuri says, and bends lower over his cup of tea, so that his hair will hide him. But, of course, it’s shorter now. It won’t hide him as well as it used to.

“Yuri. Hello.” She sounds the same as she always sounds. Composed, and self-contained to the point of coldness.

Yuri doesn’t remember the few years she had spent caring for him, between his birth and the injury that finished her career in competitive skating, and sometimes he wonders if she took that fall to allow herself to move on, from the sport and from him. Sometimes he wonders if her caretaking had been as composed and self-contained as the rest of her, if she had been the one to imbue him with a craving for touch that he would rather die than admit to.

That pride comes from her, too, he knows.

“I watched you compete,” she says now. It’s only a little awkward. As though they are strangers, figuring out the boundaries of propriety by hearing alone. And that’s what they are, isn’t it? “I loved your sets. The choreography this season is spectacular. It’s that Viktor’s, yes?”

“Yeah. Yes. I’ve been — you know I’m training in Japan now.”

“Dad told me. How are you finding it? Well, I should think. Judging by your performance.”

Yuri covers his phone with his hand, and hisses, “Can you take a hike for five fucking minutes?” at Viktor, who has been judiciously pretending not to eavesdrop. At Yuri’s demand, he flashes a bright and false smile and leaves the table. Yuri breathes out. He says, “Japan is fine. It’s hard, but that’s how it is. Viktor is a good coach. He wants —” Yuri is not sure whether he should talk to his mother about this, without consulting it first. “He wants to train me until at least the Olympics.”

“You won’t be returning to Russia before 2022?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Yuri scratches his forehead. “Probably.”

“If you think that’s best,” she allows, sounding doubtful, and Yuri wants to bristle at the presumption. Who is she to criticise his career choices? “Dad also told me you — have someone.”

Yuri goes still.

“It’s —” She laughs, a little. She talks in stops and stutters, as if uncertain of her footing in the conversation. “Yurochka, I’m glad to hear it. I never wanted — it’s so lonely when you’re good, isn’t it? When no one wants to get close, like being good is a disease and you might infect them.”

“Is that how it was for you?” Yuri asks, small and only half-willing. “No one wanted to get close to you?” Is that why you picked someone who left you, he doesn’t ask.

“Isn’t it how it is for you?”

Yuri would like to tell her that it isn’t.

After a moment, “I’m proud of you,” his mother says, intolerably gentle. “I’m very proud of you. I hope you know that.”

“I do.” Now.

“I have to go. You will take care of yourself, yes?”

“Yeah.” Yuri swallows everything else he should, maybe, probably, say to her. “You too.”

By the time Viktor comes back, his return timed so well Yuri would be suspicious if he weren’t as tired, Yuri is halfway through his tea and the only incongruity about him is the bright red impression on his forehead from where he’d put his head on the table, for a few minutes, and thought of nothing, nothing at all.


	5. Chapter 5

The rest of the run-up to Worlds is a blur. His body feels as though it has someone else in control of it: a strange passenger taking over to pull all the correct strings, and Yuri watches from the outside, all stimuli filtered through a haze of exhaustion and adrenaline coming at intervals. At the start of January he takes a few days off to spend Christmas with his grandfather in Moscow. Then, three weeks to Euros, Georgi drops out with a twisted ankle, so Yuri flies to Copenhagen and takes bronze in his stead.

Yuuri has to talk him down during the two months between Europeans and Worlds; otherwise, Yuri would try for the quad Axel. He wants his comeback season to be memorable, he wants it to make history, but Yuuri only shakes him by the back of the neck the same way he shakes Makkachin sometimes, and says, “You have two world records to your name, you already made history. You don’t need the quad Axel to win, unless you want to get a career-ending injury in front of thousands of people.”

So Yuri subsides. If Yuuri can take it in stride, having his world record surpassed, then Yuri can be smart, too.

He doesn’t fly out to watch Otabek claim gold during Four Continents, and the live stream doesn’t do his programs justice. He doesn’t respond to Yuri’s congratulatory text until the morning after the exhibition gala, and even that is curt, perfunctory. Stress is getting to him as much as it is to Yuri. Just in case, Yuri follows the text up with a photo of a fluffy, well-groomed cat that must have slipped out of a house or apartment.

He’s ready to win. His birthday passes by without him noticing, but that’s a lie: he cares enough that he wakes up already waiting for a call from his grandfather, for a text from Otabek, even — despite himself — acknowledgement from Yuuri, and Viktor. Anything to take his mind off the reality of his body slipping one step further down the inevitable track of time and decay. He is two inches taller than Otabek now. The expiration date stapled somewhere inside of him ticks away, until he won’t be able to do a hyperextended Biellmann, then an oversplit, then a regular Biellmann.

And he thinks, privately, where no one will ever be the wiser, that when the day comes he will be ready. It will be okay.

He lives by the routine of training, wakes at four forty-five in the morning to stagger into the shower. Pulls himself there by sheer will, with eyes still mostly crusted shut with fatigue. For next year, he wants to buy a portable barre to install at the onsen.

Once he’s done warming up, Mrs Katsuki is awake, and gives him breakfast that Yuri only finishes halfway.

In the short weeks between his birthday and Worlds, Yuri bullies and cajoles and wheedles until Otabek downloads Snapchat onto his phone. His days, then, are punctuated with the grind of skate blades on ice and strained muscles, and the photos that Otabek sends him. The photos Yuri sends back.

A cat for a selfie. Pictures of food: unimpressive protein shakes and energy drinks, and nothing that would truly warrant photographing. The changing seasons, Hasetsu slipping into the warmer comfort of late spring and the final melt descending over St Petersburg.

It’s less than a month before Otabek’s year with Yakov will be finished, and he will return to Almaty, and selfishly Yuri can’t wait for it. There’s only a three hour difference between Almaty and Hasetsu, he will no longer have to schedule their calls with painstaking precision to accommodate his practice or Otabek’s. He can’t wait.

…

When the time comes, everything still moves as if on fast-forward at double speed.

Yuri places third in Worlds.

He fumbles the quad loop, ruins it beyond the point of salvaging, his body like an arrow loosed too early: he folds in on himself and doesn’t fall, but rather topples to land on both feet without grace or dignity, scattering a small tide of ice shavings. It’s so prosaic that it’s almost more painful than the physical pain of his knee giving out. He wrenches the rest of his set to a ruthless, perfect edge. The spectators applaud with so much fervour that he might as well have just won gold. He can see the Russian flags flown in the stands.

There is a plastic veneer to his expression as he takes the podium.

Otabek, stood higher and to his right, seems larger than life, untouchable and radiant with pride. His hands shake with it, the weight of a nation on his shoulders finally eased. Anyone would be giddy with it, incoherent with the knowledge that he’s the first Kazakh to take gold in a competition of this calibre. Otabek is, too, but no one would be able to see beneath the composure and slightly distant smile. Yuri knows his tells.

Otabek takes him by the hand and raises it, a mirror of their shared podium at the Grand Prix Final, and the falseness of Yuri’s perfunctory smile melts off his face.

This victory means more than his loss. He knows, then, that it won’t hurt to look at pictures taken of this moment.

Yuri hobbles off the podium trying not to lean too much on Otabek, but it proves impossible. He needs to concede and let Otabek take some of his weight.

This isn’t the time or place for grand displays of affection, but Yuri still takes Otabek aside, as much as it’s possible in a crowd. There are sharp sparks of pain shooting up the length of his thigh, at the back, from the flexors, and he ignores them. He puts his hands around Otabek’s elbows, careful with the fragile bones, and pulls him as close as would appear proper while still giving them the privacy to speak.

Otabek has to slightly tilt his head up, to keep their eye contact. How could Yuri ever have thought him unreadable?

“You’ve earned this,” he says, and before Otabek can react or pull away Yuri wraps his arms around his shoulders, closing the last shred of distance between them. The embrace is fierce, it’s honest, it lasts barely a moment, and third place doesn’t weigh on Yuri at all.

There isn’t even a little pain, not when he can leverage it for pride.

“Mr Altin?” someone calls.

Otabek gives Yuri’s back one final pat, which is more like the drag of his palm down Yuri’s spine, and then Yuri can let go. He doesn’t look back.

He finds Viktor nearby, easy to spot thanks to his height and fair hair and the air of space bending around him, to allow him exactly as much as he demands. If he willed it, reality would adjusts its physical laws to suit him. He’s trying to out-shout the ruckus around them, with competitors and coaches and families and journalists milling about.

“He’s fine,” Viktor is saying into his phone in English, in a pose that doesn’t invite interruption: angled expansively with one hand on his hip, head high, like a nobleman trying to brush off an invisible retainer. “Overtrained, I think — no, I know it’s my fault! Of course. Yuuri, he’s fine. I’ll arrange something — yes, but I don’t think Fumiko will — oh, if you could, that would be fantastic. Yes. Yes. You too.”

Yuri sidles up to Viktor’s side, sticking his hands deep into the pockets of his team jacket. “What’s got Yuuri in a strop?”

“You,” says Viktor, blinking, as if it’s obvious. “That fall looked very dramatic, you know. He’s worried.”

“I didn’t fall,” Yuri mutters. The irritation he should be feeling can’t get off the ground, with Viktor looking at him like this, full of undisguised concern. When he peels off his masks, the expressions left are all the worse for their candour.

“He’s going to give your physical therapist a call. Have you got a knee brace with you here?”

Yuri shakes his head, looking down to hide the colour rising in his face — he really should have remembered — but his hair is too short to be of help.

“All right. We’ll reschedule your fight for tomorrow, as early as possible.”

“The exhibition gala,” Yuri starts, but knows what Viktor is going to tell him before he even opens his mouth. He anticipates the words, but he doesn’t anticipate the kindness: “I’m not having you skate in the gala when we don’t know how much damage your knee’s taken.”

“Ugh. You’re so much worse than Yakov.”

Yuri doesn’t have the strength or the stupidity to argue, not really; he knows Viktor is right. _I know it’s my fault_. They both pushed too hard, but Yuri has been pushing too hard from the moment he’d taken his first steps on ice. He’d been doing jumps before he could ride a bike.

He would like to think he knows the limits of his own body, that he knows the borders and precipices, which ones are safe to cross. But there’s no telling how much his body can take, freshly eighteen years old, twisting and changing as it adapts and compensates. He’s barely along for the ride, getting belated notices of _you can’t do this now_ once he’d already taken the plunge and come out on the other side, worse for wear.

But it’s what happens. It’s the deal. And at the end of the day, with stage lights and adrenaline and flags flown in the stands, with the exhilaration of winning and with crushing defeat, with the perfect catharsis of flight, if only for a second before he hits the ice again —

It’s worth it.

When he falls — when he fails — he has Viktor to catch him, and Yuuri to nag, and Otabek to keep him on his toes. It’s worth it.

…

They board the earliest available plane and are back in Hasetsu nineteen hours later, at which point Yuri has trouble walking unassisted. Physical therapy starts that night: Yuuri had either threatened or cajoled, and Fumiko, his old masseuse and PT specialist, has a stay at the onsen booked for the rest of the week.

Yuri Instagrams shameless pictures of his knee in a brace, and one with the brace laid next to his medal.

…

Yuri is not scheduled to compete in the team trophy — and if he were, it would be out of the question so soon after even a mild injury, with regular PT appointments — but he gets the summons to St Petersburg anyway, to do promotional material with the rest of top-ranking Russian representatives.

Yuri hates this part. Being paraded around like a prize horse, or a show dog of some kind, making sponsors and the FFKK officials happy. Smiling for the cameras. Of course he loves skating for Russia. Of course it’s a privilege to bring medals home. Of course he’d like to continue to win.

He flies from Tokyo to Moscow, then gets a domestic flight to St Petersburg, and it’s warm when he gets there, mild and pleasant, the air a little humid. It’s an unexpected pain that opens up somewhere between his lungs, confined in his ribcage, as if he’d held his breath for too long and releasing it hurts. The city is so familiar he could navigate it without sight or hearing, and he’s missed it, the bridges and rivers coiling and twisting, snakelike but without the bite. Stubborn grey birds in Palace Square and not nearly enough cats, no matter what people say about the Armitage; jogging down to Gostinyi dvor to take a late train to Rybatskoye, where Yakov had been renting him an apartment for all the time Yuri had been in St Petersburg.

He’s missed the Mariinsky and missed Lilia’s scoffed pronouncements about its quality compared to her dearly beloved Bolshoi. Their home rink, the construction site down the road making it sometimes impossible to hear the music, but never enough to drown out Yakov’s screaming. Mila trying to wheedle him into doing lifts, except she’d be the one to lift him, _Come on, come on, you just need to look pretty and fly_. Georgi and Anya circling each other like wolves scenting prey, though which is which, Yuri could never tell.

Practice is still going when his plane lands. Yuri takes no detours, just makes a direct beeline from the airport to the rink.

He’d watched Otabek’s triumphant Erlkönig at Worlds, but he hopes to catch it now, too, washing up at the shores of the passing season.

It’s odd, not to be changing into training gear, not pulling on and lacing up skates: Yuri has still got his backpack thrown over one shoulder, and he’s stamping down on a grin as he finally makes it to the ice, leaning against and over the boards to yell, “That’s disgusting, Mila, your footwork is a disgrace! Do you lose a bit of talent for every pound you gain!?”

Mila comes to a stop in the centre of the rink, and it’s so familiar, seeing her hackles rise, her graceful poise melting into hot fury. “You little —”

It’s as if no time had passed at all. Yuri lets himself be manhandled, gets into a bit of a slapfight with her, then lets her hug him, since she’s clearly dying to do so. The others follow soon enough. Two new faces that Yuri had never seen before, juniors in their last season as such, and then Otabek, coming back to the rink from the other side, where the lockers are.

Yuri lifts his eyebrows, tilting his chin up, angling his expression into as much haughty arrogance as he can muster.

“Obviously you’re a lost cause, but still, I hope you’re using your last days here well.”

“It’s amazing how time can make the heart fonder, but then I remember how much of an asshole you are,” says Otabek easily, eyes crinkling at the corners: the only concession he makes to a smile, when his mouth remains pressed into a flat line.

“Shut up,” Mila tells them both. “Yura, did you see my Insta? We did a carry lift, it was amazing.”

“It was terrible,” Otabek corrects her. “But we lived.”

Yuri waves them both away, uncaring. He did see the short video, and Mila laughing full-throated and happy when she’d landed on her ass, with Otabek looking constipated in the background. He lets the easy conversation wash over him, participating when it’s required, or when he has something pithy and rude to contribute. The whole time he keeps sneaking furtive glances at Otabek, in his black training gear, and remembers the video Mila had sent him all those months ago, Otabek practising his routine. The height of his jumps, the grind of ice beneath his blades.

After a time that Yuri suspect is carefully staged, Yakov appears as if from nowhere, to shout at Mila to get back on ice before she wasted any more of her scheduled training time, and thumps Yuri on the back in belated congratulations for his performance at Worlds, with enough force that it sends Yuri staggering forward. The small welcoming committee disperse, though not quite all of them.

“Looking forward to the promo stuff?” Otabek asks, leaning against the board next to Yuri, arms folded over their edge so he can look at the skaters on ice and not at Yuri. The warmth of his body is enough that it doesn’t matter that Yuri forgot to bring gloves and a scarf to the rink.

Yuri groans. “Don’t even start, they want to do a photoshoot. What for? I don’t get it.”

“Well, for one thing, if they only take pictures then your personality won’t ruin the PR effect.”

“Very funny.” Yuri edges in a little closer. “You’re lucky you have the best cat on the planet, it’s like your one redeeming quality.”

“Ouch. She is the best cat, though. She’s missed you.”

“I’ve seen her like twice in my life,” says Yuri, just to argue. Maybe they’re not talking about Otabek’s cat any more.

Some of their conversations are like that, happening in two places at once, and Yuri steps carefully around them as though they are minefields, but any explosion would only be his own weakness, bared. Ill-advised or no, sometimes he lets the weakness show, anyway. Takes a purposeful step on a mine.

Otabek shrugs. When Yuri turns, far enough to look out of the corner of his eye, Otabek’s expression — the half of it visible in profile — is horribly, unbearably open. He says, “You know cats. She doesn’t need to spend every waking hour with you to get attached.”

“Well — good. I guess I got attached, too. It’s only fair.”

Out on the other side of the rink, Yakov shouts again, this time at one of the younger skaters. Not so young that she cowers. Good, Yuri thinks. If she has a backbone, then perhaps she will last.

It has never been a question, where Yuri would be staying during his brief two days in St Petersburg; as soon as he’d told Otabek about the invitation, it had been agreed, with few words spoken. So once practice is finished, Yuri follows Otabek to the lockers where Otabek collects his gear and his gym bag, unwinds the scarf from his neck, changes into a leather jacket that Yuri recognises from a photo.

A third thing he’d missed, even if not directly related to St Petersburg, is the bike. It will always remind him of the first time Otabek had taken him for a ride, even if that bike had only been a rental. Otabek had brought his own to St Petersburg, and it’s the most natural thing in the world to strap in behind him, to have a spare helmet already waiting.

Otabek chooses the scenic route north to Vasilievsky, and Bolshoi Prospekt from there. Yuri rarely gets to take the city in like this, through the main arteries, most of the time reduced to navigating the metro. He’s missed it. The city, the slightly humid air, the reluctant arrival of spring. He’s missed it, but it isn’t home, and the thought should not be surprising, but it is: the realisation that he might return here, after Hasetsu, but not out of attachment. Not out of a sense of belonging.

Yuri keeps one arm wrapped securely around Otabek’s waist, taking in the warmth of him undamped by layers of clothes, and stretches out his other hand to the side, to feel wind whipping between his fingers.

The apartment that Otabek takes him to is small, a little cramped, and visibly occupied by two people.

“Normally you’d have to suffer through my roommate,” says Otabek, dropping his gym bag by the door and taking Yuri’s backpack to leave it in his bedroom, “but he’s off university at the moment, visiting his girlfriend in Moscow. I’ll be packing up in three weeks, anyway.”

At the sound of Otabek voice there is a clatter in another room, and in a moment Murka dashes through the doorway to greet him, tail ramrod straight and pointing up in unmitigated joy. She stops when she sees Yuri, and Yuri, trying not to show how much he’d like to smile, drops down into a squat to say hello. Murka sidesteps Otabek entirely, to his amusement.

“God, I missed you,” Yuri says as she butts the palm of his hand with her head, demanding touch, purring as though she has a tiny engine buried in her chest. “She loves me best. Don’t get sad or anything, but you know I’m her favourite.”

Otabek watches the spectacle that Yuri makes of himself, until Murka deems the physical affection sufficient, and dodges out from beneath Yuri’s palm. Otabek holds out one hand and Yuri takes it, and pulls himself to his feet.

“Yeah,” says Otabek, opaque but transparent at the same time. “Yeah, you’re the favourite.”

They move around each other without the easy familiarity of the times they’ve spent together in hotels, scattered across the world. This is Otabek’s space, this small, cramped apartment he shares with a university student whom Yuri doesn’t care to ever meet. There is clutter, a laptop plugged into a wall socket, lying shut on a low table with its intended occupants — two half-emptied mugs of tea or coffee — pushed to the side, a teaspoon inside one.

Yuri loves knowing that Otabek is not neat or tidy, that he leaves a mess and doesn’t bother cleaning it up immediately; that he’s human and idiosyncratic, that he has things about him that wouldn’t be obvious to an onlooker. That he’s so private, and few ever get to see this.

Yuri moves around the apartment with licentious curiosity, picking stuff up and putting it down in a different place, stepping around a sweatshirt on the floor, some socks. There is a t-shirt thrown over a chair, a crumpled energy bar wrapper half-buried between sofa cushions. A console peeking out from underneath the television set, with a box open on the floor beside it, next to the controller. In comparison, Yuri’s room at the onsen would seem almost pristine.

A home away from home.

“I didn’t know what you’d want to eat,” Otabek calls from the kitchen, “but there’s stuff in the freezer, and eggs and protein powder, and a blender, so you should be fine.”

“Yeah, it’s okay.” Yuri almost offers to order food to be delivered, like people do in movies, but the thought is ludicrous. “And since you’re putting me up I figured I could cook for you, anyway.”

There is silence, that Yuri uses to look over Otabek’s book collection, although judging by the titles and genre he wouldn’t be surprised if it belonged to the roommate. He feels Otabek’s gaze settle on his back, warm between his shoulder blades, and takes a moment before he turns. Otabek is leaning in the doorway, arms folded over his chest, feet crossed at the ankles.

“You don’t have to earn room and board,” he says, deadpan. “I didn’t even know you could cook.”

“Of course I can cook, my grandfather taught me.”

“Hm. You learn something new every day.”

Yuri squints at him, unsure of whether to take offence. He gets up from the floor, moves without entirely meaning to, pulled into Otabek’s orbit. Otabek meets him in the middle. He’s perhaps three inches shorter now, and somewhere along the way Yuri has learned that praying away his growth spurts will bring him nothing but disappointment: all he can do is adapt and adjust, and move on, reinventing the status quo of his own body over and over, never quite settling into his bones.

Other than on ice, the only times he feels at ease in his skin is when Otabek is touching it. He can’t pinpoint when, exactly, that happened. Has he always thought Otabek composed and self-contained, the way he remembers his mother, or is he seeing similarities where there are none? Otabek has never been cold. He’s nothing like any other people in Yuri’s life.

Earlier, last year, he might have been able to lean against Otabek and lay his head over Otabek’s collar bone, and take a small measure of comfort in the difference in their heights.

Now, though, he can drape himself over Otabek, and it’s almost as good. Arms thrown haphazardly over his shoulders and sticking up on the other side; Yuri hides his face in the crook of Otabek’s neck, in the vulnerable place where he can feel arterial blood thrum beneath fragile skin. It puts a strain on his spine to bend like this, but Otabek’s hands drift to his back, settling easily into the inward curve of it, light and unassuming, and Yuri forgets about discomfort.

“Hi,” he finds himself saying, somewhat inanely. He could say: your cat isn’t the only thing I missed. He doesn’t. It gets more and more difficult not to say the things that he’s always thought should not be spoken, not by him. With Otabek, he knows that those minefields are all self-inflicted, and he can let them be disarmed.

Otabek is the only person to ever look at him and see war, yet it’s only with him that Yuri puts his weapons down.

Otabek needs to adjust before his mouth is no longer smothered against Yuri’s hoodie, and lifts his chin, to be able to rest it on Yuri’s shoulder. Without seeing him, Yuri can tell that the smile in his voice wouldn’t be showing on his face.

“Hi,” he says, and they spend a silent minute standing there, in the middle of Otabek’s unkempt apartment, in a space as concrete and grounded as either of them can afford.

Yuri doesn’t brace himself, just allows Otabek to take as much of his weight as seems prudent, relaxing into the warmth of him and the comforting fulcrum of his body, and breathes.

Later, for the first time, Yuri goes to bed and the bed smells like Otabek, naked but without rush, and not tired to the bone. It’s odd. They’ve done this not enough times, perhaps, to be routine; but it isn’t new. They’d gone to bed together. Yuri can name the cities where it happened.

They end up with him plastered to Otabek’s back, curled up against him like the fit of a glove, from knees to chest, as if it could negate the breadth of continents that tend to separate them. Yuri drags his hand up Otabek’s bare thigh, down, up again, tracing the shape of muscle, smiling against the back of Otabek’s neck at the ticklish feeling of soft hair at his palm. Legs of a dancer, even if Otabek hadn’t practised ballet in years.

Yuri finally finds it in himself to stop teasing when Otabek growls, voice stitched through with need and tight with it, “I swear you’re only patient when you want to piss me off — Yura, come _on_.” Even then, Yuri takes his time, lined up between Otabek’s thighs and moving his hips without hurry; he reaches around to bring Otabek off at the same time, until Otabek starts to claw at his hip, his grip slipping over damp skin. They’re pressed so close together that Yuri feels the smallest change in the cadence of Otabek’s breathing as if it were his own lungs stuttering and spasming.

It’s quiet in all but the sounds their bodies make, and Yuri finishes silently, too. When he shuts his eyes, all he can smell is Otabek’s sheets and his sweat; all he can hear are noises of simple animal need. Afterwards they clean up like Yuri imagines normal people do, so as to not go back to bed with dry come crusted on someone’s stomach, someone else’s hand. Easy and comfortable.

It’s always a small shock to be reminded of how comfortable it is, to fall asleep holding someone. Or being held. Their limbs fall into an easy tangle, Otabek’s leg between Yuri’s thighs, their feet caught together. One of Otabek’s arms circles Yuri’s ribcage, his forehead rests against the topmost ridge of Yuri’s spine, and it’s as though with Otabek keeping him pinned like this, Yuri’s body could not be wrenched from him even by competition, even by training.

His body can be his own.

He will wake up early the next morning to be there for the promotional photoshoot at nine, to make Yakov happy and not keep the team waiting. He will fiddle with his tie, the cuffs of his ill-fitting but smart-looking suit, picked out by a fashion designer paid by the FFKK to outfit Russia’s top skaters. He will be bored, and irritable, and it’s going to be a nightmare to sit still in hellishly uncomfortable, staged positions.

He will return to Otabek’s rented apartment and let Otabek peel him out of the suit, the tie, the dress shirt; he will let Otabek slowly undo his belt and slip it out of its loops, and let it fall to the floor, and forget about it, with Otabek kneeling for him a far more enticing sight.

Six hours after that, he will board a flight to Helsinki, and from there to Tokyo.

…

He sends Otabek a photo of his palm split open down the middle, a casualty of skating without gloves. It’s an ugly, if shallow, cut. The edges are all torn and bloody tissue. It’s repulsive. Yuri can’t stop picking at the jagged bits of skin.

In return, Otabek sends him a screen capture of a flight booking. In three weeks’ time, at the pivot of Otabek’s move from St Petersburg back to Almaty. One passenger, Domodedovo International—Narita International. Return in two weeks.

It’s going to be the longest they will have spent together. _FINALLY_ , Yuri writes back, and somehow no other words are necessary.

…

The morning before his off-season officially starts, Yuri takes Makkachin for a walk. He can’t bear to stay at the onsen any longer with everyone there, weekend guests and Yuuri and Yuuri’s family and Yuuri’s friends and Viktor. It feels sometimes that he can only exist in the spaces that Viktor leaves vacant: that there is a finite amount of oxygen between them and Yuri has to be sustained by whatever is leftover after Viktor passes, whirlwind of charisma sucking all attention from any room he walks into.

It’s fine. It’s who Viktor is, and perhaps without it he would not be as good.

When the family and friends get to be too much, Yuri just offers to take Makkachin for a long walk by the pier, and doesn’t wait for permission before ducking out of the onsen’s common area where the respectable adults are well on their way toward a comfortable Sunday beer-fuelled buzz.

Makkachin tugs at the leash with hopeless abandon, and there isn’t much that Yuri can do to stop him, so he just lets himself be pulled, and follows whichever direction the dog chooses. He never seems to mind that Yuri doesn’t quite know to do with him. He’s nothing like a cat; rather, there’s something quintessentially canine about him that Yuri can’t put his finger on.

He lets Makkachin take him to the beach, and in return Makkachin lets Yuri film to his heart’s content as he chases seagulls and daintily refuses to get his paws wet.

Yuri can’t tell when Hasetsu stopped seeming transient, like the slow liminal weeks between changing seasons. He can’t tell when Hasetsu became a fixture. A place that someone could live.

He doesn’t hear anyone approaching, only sees the shadow swathing his own where it falls over gritty brown sand.

“Can I sit with you?” Yuuri asks, and takes Yuri’s shrug as an invitation. When Yuri turns it’s to see him in profile, illuminated by the midday sun from directly above: the light catches on his glasses and he looks very pale, lit like this. He looks in the direction where Makkachin is digging a shallow grave for a tree branch that’s half his size. “You’re okay, right?”

“Of course I’m okay.” Yuri digs his shoes deeper into the sand, until the toes disappear. He has arrived once again at the place where English feels almost natural, but it always takes him a moment to arrange his thoughts into the inflexible confines of subject and object order.

“You left a little abruptly. I wanted to make sure. Ah — Makkachin, leave that!”

No reaction comes, so Yuri repeats the command in Russian. At the sound of it Makkachin’s ears flatten against his skull, and he reluctantly lets go of whatever piece of garbage he was nosing at. He trots back to where Yuri and Yuuri are sat, and lets Yuuri sink both hands into the curly mess of fur over his nape.

“Sometimes it’s just so loud there,” Yuri says, looking at the steady ebb and rise of the sea. “I never know what to do with myself over weekends. Do you ever get that?”

“I used to,” says Yuuri. He’s addressing Makkachin, but Yuri thinks that it’s only so he can pretend that his expression is directed at the dog. He almost looks fond. “When I was skating. Well, I had friends, but not that many friends. And I just wanted it to be Monday, so I could get back to practice.”

Yuri opens his mouth to respond that he doesn’t have friends, he doesn’t need them, but the words die halfway out of his throat and he shuts his mouth. Makkachin lies down over Yuuri’s feet, content to be petted, even if his ears remain at stiff attention; he tracks the progress of the gulls swarming a pile of rubbish, and Yuri watches it with unseeing eyes.

He should have noticed it sooner, he thinks. He doesn’t need friends, but his needs have little to do with it. Otabek, of course, first and truest; but he’s been a lot of Yuri’s firsts. Then Mila, even if they haven’t talked in ages before those two days in St Petersburg. They always slip into the old skin of one-sided antagonism and sibling rivalry with perfect ease, and even after skating is over, Yuri thinks that Mila will stay. Lilia and Yakov are too inseparable from the discipline. But Minako, who has never actually seen Yuri live on ice, who shares his disquiet. Mrs Katsuki. Viktor — maybe Viktor. Yuuri.

Makkachin’s tail thumps against the sand when Yuuri moves to scratch behind his ears.

“I needed to get away for a bit, too.” Yuuri flashes Yuri a tentative smile, as if not entirely sure of how to make it less self-deprecating. “Viktor’s creative process is a little…”

“Creative process?”

“He’s had a stroke of inspiration.” Yuri takes his hands off Makkachin to sketch out sarcastic quotes in the air. “For your choreography next season. He was yelling something about Gershwin and improvisation, so I left before I throttled him.”

Yuri sighs. He can picture it, and the word ‘improvisation’, in the context of Viktor, sounds more like a threat. “If he wants to break new ground again, maybe I should take out some kind of life insurance.”

“He wouldn’t actually kill you,” says Yuuri. A moment passes. Then: “I hope.”

It startles Yuri into laughing, and he smothers the sound against the rolled-down sleeve of his hoodie. He can’t remember the last time he’s had a civilised conversation with Yuuri, but that isn’t quite right. What he can’t remember is the last time they’ve come out of a conversation fractured, thrown off-balance by their oppositional magnetism.

“If he does, he’ll probably rope you into coming out of retirement just so satisfy his egomania.”

“We don’t choose the ones we love,” says Yuuri with a philosophical shrug, and doesn’t bother trying to defend Viktor’s honour. “Have you thought about renting an apartment of your own? It’s not that I — I mean.” He laughs, and runs his hand over his hair, setting it all askew. “You can stay at the onsen, my parents don’t mind at all. And we don’t, of course. But —”

“I thought about it.” It feels a little strange to deliberately save Yuuri from an awkward conversational trap. It’s Yuri’s turn to shrug. He had thought about it, but found that he has no particular wish to leave. “But maybe later on, maybe in Fukuoka. I don’t know. But I’ve thought about it.”

“Okay. If you ever need any help with Japanese, or paperwork — well, if I could somehow manage in America then you can manage in Japan.”

Yuri has been managing since the age of six. That Yuuri thinks of him as a child, still, at newly-eighteen, doesn’t so much anger Yuri as it serves to remind him that most people have the privilege of still being kids at eighteen. A strange, alien concept.

“Did you watch me?”

Yuuri smiles, without actually smiling. Did he learn it from Viktor, or did Viktor learn it from him? Before he speaks, Yuri knows that Yuuri will make him say it: “Did I watch you what?”

“Did you watch me compete in Worlds.”

“Of course I did,” Yuuri says, with a hint of reproach. “I’ve watched you compete this whole season; for the Grand Prix, the whole onsen went into lockdown. Minako got so drunk when you won, she puked all over me.”

The warmth that settles at the centre of Yuri’s body, between ribs and stomach, is not entirely comfortable.

“But deep down, you didn’t really feel the theme, did you?” Yuuri says it with unerring kindness. A little removed, a little cold, but only on the surface of it. He still forgets that building walls to protect himself comes off as coldness to other people, even after he invites them inside.

Yuri scowls at the sea. “I wouldn’t have won if I didn’t. And anyway, what’s more to get? The chosen one dances to death and spring comes in.”

“Maybe,” Yuuri allows. “But you’re not the chosen one, are you? You’re spring. You’re the new thing coming in, on the corpse of something discarded. Even if it’s parts of you, then you don’t need them. Something dies, and you grow on what’s left.” He jumps when Makkachin lets out a little startled bark at a seagull taking flight, and laughs, abashed. “If anything, Viktor is the chosen one. You’re the thing that comes after.”

For a moment, Yuri can only swallow, compulsively, around the constriction of his throat. “That’s the most pretentious thing I’ve ever heard,” he says, too loud. “Viktor would shit himself if he heard you talk about his choreography all high-brow like that.”

“At least I get it,” says Yuuri, but he’s laughing as he says it, they’re both laughing.

Yuuri leaves soon after, taking Makkachin with him. For another half hour Yuri lets himself stay at the beach, with its lonely pallor, watching the gentle crash of waves. He stays there until his knee begins to twinge, from the stillness of his position, and instead of stretching out his leg and allowing the aching ligaments a moment of respite he gets up, dusts off his trousers, picks up his backpack.

He takes a photo of the sea. It’s strange and empty, out there in the distance. Atypically, Yuri leaves the picture on his phone without posting it online or sending to anyone.

A small piece of Hasetsu to carry with him. Another liminal space caught in time. On the verge of early summer, with something new coming in.

Yuri smiles as he thinks it. The parts of him sacrificed and discarded, those parts he didn’t need. What is left, who is left, and what grows anew: these parts are the only ones to matter.

He smiles all the way back home.

**Author's Note:**

> So there you have it. Is this a bildungsroman? God, I think it might be. Horrible. Call the police.
> 
> I’m not sure how the free skate music became the whole…thing in this fic, but it has, and here we are, so: the FS that Viktor choreographs for Yuri is set to the Sacrificial Dance from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (which I doubt would make for good figure skating music, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Realism schmealism). The production mentioned in the story is by Angelin Preljocaj. There is quite a lot of nudity; google at your own peril.
> 
> I’m sure that Yuri’s family situation, like everything here, will get massively jossed in season 2, but you will pry emotionally repressed Russian dysfunction from my cold dead hands. For the purposes of this fic, Svetlana Plisetskaya was a rather good pairs skater who suffered a career-ending injury shortly after having Yuri; since there was no father in the picture, Yuri’s patronymic comes from his grandfather.
> 
> Finally, credit where credit is due: if a scene, line or plot point is particularly Terrible No Good Very Bad, then chances are that [Nat](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Febricant) enabled it. (“What if –” “You gotta.”) Otabek and JJ’s odd, incongruous friendship owes its existence to [Raimi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/gunboots), because she is the source of 68% of my interest in all permutations of JJ/Otabek/Yuri.
> 
> And that’s all she wrote! Thanks for taking a chance on this weird niche fic, it’s been a fun time. You can find me on the [tungler](http://swordpunk.tumblr.com) if you’d like to say hi.


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